TBPN Live - Meta AI Vibes & ChatGPT Pulse Reactions, Friend’s Billboard Blitz | Roon

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

(02:11) - Meta AI Vibes Reactions (45:21) - ChatGPT Pulse Reactions (01:12:00) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:35:06) - Friend OOH Campaign Reactions (01:46:28) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:52:26) - Roon, an anonymous and influential online poster, discusses the transformative impact of AI tools like Codex and Claude code on software development, emphasizing their potential to significantly enhance productivity and reshape the industry. He also explores the broader implications of AI integration into daily life, touching on topics such as the evolution of user interactions with AI models, the role of open-source AI, and the cultural significance of media like the anime "Evangelion." Additionally, Roon reflects on the dynamics of talent acquisition in the AI sector and the interplay between legal frameworks and innovation in the U.S. economy. (02:30:58) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TBPN. Today is Friday, September 26, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital de Capitel. De Capitale. El Capitel, de Capitel. Massive news in the AI world in the product layer, in the application layer, two apps launched yesterday, really, two features. One in the meta-a-I app called Vibes, and one in the ChatGPT app called Pulse. Two very different apps. Neither of them are going to save you time and money. The only one that can save you time and money is Ramp.Ramp.com.

Time is money. Save both. cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Good morning to everyone in the chat. We had John Axley live in the TVPN Ultradome yesterday. It was great to see and stop by. It's great to see you, John. We got a couple app demos, caught up with a few folks, did a little photo shoot yesterday.

Had a great time. We did. And, of course, we are live on Restream. Restream.orgian. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. Multi-stream, reach your audience, wherever they are. Wherever they are. We also get this book really quickly.

Just to say thanks to everyone before we go into our top stories. Grepetile sent a book called Fault Lines about the history of bugs, because of course, Grepetile helps you find bugs. And I thought this was interesting. They tell the story of the first bug at the Harvard Computation Lab in 1947, said one relay stalled, a technician checked the console, traced the path, and opened the door to Relay 70 on Panel F. Inside, a moth was jammed in the switch.

They removed it, taped it into the lab log, and captured. it first actual case of bug being found the log made the term bug literal and cemented the practice find the cause write it down keep the knowledge very cool uh let's get into the news yes uh and we have uh i guess we should highlight we're going to have uh none other than ruin on at one pm today so that'll be in a couple hours yeah i can't wait for that in the meantime a lot of stuff to talk through. The timeline has been in turmoil. It has. Interesting that Pulse was launched the same day as vibes. They got very different, they got very different reactions to steam roll big technology companies. Well, I think, yeah, I have to wonder. I mean, chat GBT has the

benefit of like they're launching Pulse in the core app. People are just going to discover it and use it if they're paid and they can roll it out that way. Vibes. I thought it was interesting that they even launched this so aggressively into the timeline. Yep. Because the reaction was almost universally negative. On X. On X. Yes.

The question is, will children like it? Will the elderly like it? Moms like it, yeah. But we should get into it. Well, let's start by playing the actual video for everyone. So if you haven't seen Alex Wang, who we had on the show last week at MetaConnect, posted the initial launch I think he launched the entire product

he said excited to share vibes a new feed in the meta AI app for short form AI generated videos this is on the back of the Mid Journey partnership we can go way deeper into what's going on here in the reaction but I mean just the numbers on this is crazy

2.8000 likes 2.4,000 quote tweets or retweets and 1.6,000 insane ratio insane in the show, but this is, of course, you know, there's a lot of nuance here that we're going to go into, but let's kick it off by watching the actual one-minute trailer for vibes, the new app from Meta. It's in the Meta-I app. You actually have to reinstall the app or go and update

the app. Are you channeling the vibes? Are you feeling the vibes? The create button. So when this launched, I went to the meta AI app and I typed in, okay, meta AI, I'm ready to use the new vibes feature. How do you do it? And it was very confused. And it was saying, like, I'm not aware of that. I don't know anything about that. It's because the older app was not aware of the new app existing. And so I had to go to the app store and actually refresh. But once I did, I got in and I saw a lot of this type of content, an astronaut on a bike, two bears boxing, a cap, talking at a news desk, women running in clouds, all very AI aesthetic. It has a very unique look to it that I would just describe as like the AI art look these days. It's not trying to... Not the AI. Yeah, it feels like

it's not trying to be anything but AI in the same way that a lot of a lot of CGI and 3D renders have a certain aesthetic to them. It's an interesting thing where if you showed one of these assets to somebody 10 years ago, they would have thought, that looks really cool. Yeah. And now the reaction is that looks like AI. Yep. And people just don't think it's cool. Yeah.

Like I, you know, personally, I think there's a market for this. And obviously, this is the worst that the model, the worst the models will ever be. Yeah. So the images will get better. But I think the reaction, Sean Sankar, he quoted it. He said, read the wall of quote tweets that categorically reject this AI slop. We are so back. We are going to win.

And he hits it with a salute to the American flag, which is just crazy to be, picking it off. Crazy to dunk. Crazy. You don't see Sean dunking. No. I mean, they're also partnered. I'm pretty sure Palantir is model agnostic, uses Lama, which is, Alex is working in defense llama.

But, you know, like when people are not down with a thing, like, you know, they're going to speak their mind. Yeah, I mean, I think the, it's interesting because X is such a microcosm, right? It's not a reflection of the average internet user. It's certainly not a reflection of the average meta-platforms user. I think that there's another world where they just started promoting this in Instagram and Facebook and just started driving users over kind of quietly. And I think this was like a very unforced like PR error to come out because you can't.

You can't tell somebody, you basically, you know, I believe that they want, they truly want and will build their version of personal super intelligence. But when you've just been hitting people over the head with messaging about personal super intelligence, and then the first thing you launch from MSL with your new massive partnership with Mid Journey is a trough flop, that's rough, right? It sends a signal to the market, and I think this just makes their job harder. from a recruiting standpoint, right? Do you want to work at Anthropic, which believes in Machine God, which has like a cult, right? Their team, they didn't lose a lot of people

in the talent wars, right? They even lost some people to Curser and got them back a week later. Yeah, Luke Metro was commenting on this. He said, I would not be surprised if this tweet alone is going to make meta-super intelligences raise their signing bonuses by $1 million.

Yeah, or even more, right? Because even, you know, even when you look at your options, it's like you can go live in Elon world and work on XAI and be super hardcore and sleep in the office and get that sort of tap into that Elon. I mean, there's a fair amount of slop going on. Sure, there's slop, but at least it's just like, romantic companion stuff. At least you're buying, you're riding with Elon who is a. You have the cool narrative around like building Colossus too really fast. And going after, like, the MMO and the benchmarks and all that stuff.

Elon posts Slop, but when you look at their, like, when they talk about benchmarks, what benchmarks are they really going after? It's like really. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Elon does a good job of, like, he'll be retweeting a lot of, quite frankly, like, Slop videos, right? But then he will refocus the conversation back on, we're going to solve physics. Or, like, we're going to discover new physics.

We're going to do really hard math. And, you know, let's give meta a couple days to see if they can kind of steer the conversation back towards something that gets technologists excited because they could. It's possible that they come out with something. For sure. It's just when you have the entire world waiting and honestly kind of preying on their downfall, right? Yeah. Like the world is not rooting the world broadly, the industry broadly, when you look at all these different camps, Open AI, lost a bunch of top. talent, MSL. They're not sitting there, you know, excited for meta to do something amazing,

right, which I'm sure they will at different points. And so public opinion is already against you. And then you come out and launch a product that is, you know, dedicated to the thing that people like the least about AI. Yeah. So I have a rebuttal, but first I'm going to tell you about Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build up. I'm crypto, rail, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. The official wallet infrastructure provider of the TBPN Ultrodome. That's what you call a layup. Boom. Boom. Slams it down. So yeah, so basically they just set up this, they set up the perfect product, the perfect video.

Yes. To just allow the entire internet to do the craziest alley you. Okay. Okay. So first off, I totally get the backlash is undeniable. That's just a fact. Like the timeline hates it in terms of like if meta's on the offense today and the timelines on the defense like the defense slammed it down. Not a single point got through. But what's weird about this is that David Holes, the founder of Mid Journey, who created this model, who created this aesthetic, is loved in tech. And he's one of the of the, I think the most, one of the most respected founders. He hasn't raised a dime of venture capital. He built this incredible model. A bit of money in the terms of revenue. Yeah, but in general, Mid Journey has been the one video generator, image generator that has been sort of celebrated as the least sloppy, I guess, and the most opinionated. And so I feel like maybe the meta team

just thought that by partnering with Mid Journey, they would beat the slop allegations. But it is weird that we're not seeing any of the goodwill that David Holes has, transfer over to MSL, which I don't know how to unpack. David, pitch me back on that. David is not, they had an announcement, but he's not a, you know, he didn't post yesterday. It's not like he came out and was like, hey guys, I'm really excited for our new checkout meta-AI vibes.

Yeah, that's fair. Also the name. The name is a little bit stale. It's just the most overused word of the year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, didn't you call the top on slop like a year ago or something like that? I remember you saying like... So it was earlier this year, I just, I think...

You said like the terms overused at this point. Yeah, it's just widely used. And meta created a product that is giving slop, it's a bull market in slop again. Yes, yes. Because... Okay, so... But again, and I want to be clear that I'm not like... like putting, like, I don't judge MSL based on this product,

but I judge the, I think it was a poor marketing strategy for AI efforts at Meta broadly. Yeah. When in a few days they're launching a product that has a heads-up display with AI built into it. It's like get people to focus on that. Yeah. Right?

Maybe. Yeah. Like that's the functionality that's actually really cool. We've used it. walk around, you can be like, hey, Meta, looking at my fridge right now, what should I make for dinner? And it'll tell you, and it'll give you recipes, and it'll show it on a heads-up display, and it's awesome. Yeah. But this was just a totally unforced error. There is a little complicated. Like, it felt like the, it really, to me, I was seeing parallels between, you know,

that iconic image of Mark Zuckerberg, like in the metaverse when everybody saw it. And they were like, oh, it's with the Ival tower. Yeah, and it was like, oh, it's over. Like, the metaverse is over. Yeah. Um, interesting. So the, I have a few, I have a few things I want to peel back on that. So, um, first, cognition is the maker of Devin. Devin is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Go sign up, please. Also the makers of windsurf. Also the makers of windsor, fantastic. They're absolutely cooking over there.

And the hero. Fantastic transition, John. I tried to interrupt my, you perfectly interrupted my rant with an ad. Yes. Great sign of respect. So I want you to, I want you to shift back to the studio Ghibli moment, images in Chatchip-T, and try and relive that. Because I feel like that came out and it was AI-generated content. It had a very AI-generated aesthetic.

There's a world where that looked really sloppy, but... It didn't, though. What was your experience? It was AI perfectly emulating at scale one of the most loved aesthetics on the internet ever. That was the beauty of it. It was like anybody could make something that wasn't slopped. It was like, you know, time from somebody having an idea for the prompts to a beautiful image. And sure, it got overused.

Sure, you don't see them a ton anymore. yeah but that was i remember the the the the little joy of turning an image of like me and my family you know with my family into a ghibli picture and that was fun it was a super fun day on the internet we had a ton of fun with it yeah i made multiple i had a couple that went super viral everybody made like 50 everyone made a ton and then eventually it got burned out like any like any uh aesthetic or meta it just burns out on the internet yes and so like launch videos are there were a few hot takes on the timeline that were like i don't like this then then there were also the there was also the backlash to like you shouldn't be stealing studio ghibli's

aesthetic uh your yeah if i was if i was studio gibley i don't know if it like what's your what's your verdict do you think that was good overall net positive for studio gibley or do you think it it actually well i ran the i ran a sort of test where i took a image from oppenheimer and i studio gibbleed it of Einstein talking to Robert Oppenheimer's this iconic scene and I gibbleed it and I put that up and that got like a thousand likes because everything that was decent, every decent meme that got gibbleed that day got a thousand likes. And then I took it a real frame from Spirited Away the most iconic studio Ghibli film, like a real frame, not an AI generated one. And I put that up, 10 likes. And it was very funny to be like, people don't actually want

Studio Ghibli. They want Studio Ghibli filter applied to something else iconic because it allows them to do this mental puzzle of oh I'm seeing something that's iconic it's the bell curve meme or it's the always

two astronauts in space shooting at each other always has been Ghibli'd and it's like oh I get the joke I've seen what was magical about is you took a style of illustration and animate you know illustration yes that historically was extremely expensive and time-consuming and made it instant and it was basically as good right

and I'm sure I'm sure true uh studio Ghibli enthusiast would be like yeah I'm gonna pull up the two pictures and look like they didn't get this part of the handwrite or whatever but it was beautiful it was magical yes and that was that was undeniable yes I'm glad we're not seeing them if you're trying to make something beautiful and undeniable go to figma.com think bigger build faster Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. But my point was that with the Studio Ghibli aesthetic, it was actually personal super intelligence. It was personal.

And what made that go so viral in a way that I think everyone liked was that they could Studio Ghibli themselves. They could Studio Ghibli. It acted as this interesting filter where I saw, remember the very first one that went viral? It was a man with his wife. And he was like, life hack, take a photo with you and your loved one and Studio Ghibli and send it to that.

they will be overjoyed. And I remember the first 12 hours, people were like, I don't know, how is everybody making these? Yeah, exactly. It was still like there was a narrow window that. Yes. But there's something where if you empower the individual to create something that's personal to them, then they are more inspired, more defensive of it, more happy with it.

There's something there that's more satisfying, even if it is like it's, it's, it's It's not slop because there's still that element of uniqueness in it. And this gets into the huge problem with meta-a-I vibe. With vibes is that it doesn't start with your Instagram profile. And I was pitching this. I was pitching this. I was saying Instagram. No, even more specifically, you were showing some of the results you got this morning.

And to anybody that hasn't downloaded the app yet, you downloaded it, and it's a bunch of high-quality assets for what they are, right? well you can say it's the mid journey explore page yeah like literally so it's like elite mid journey like results yeah right animated and you know it's it's solid but it's it's more like a just a collection of assets it's not a you know they've basically ceded the feed with a bunch of super curated assets yes and everybody I think we had a few people on the team looking at it. Everybody's getting the exact same results.

Yes. Like almost a mirror image. If you open the meta AI app, I can guarantee you that within 10 scrolls, you will see a monkey on a jet ski. Like, it's the best. The monkey of jet ski, it's a great video, honestly. Hit that horn. Hit that horn.

Hey, every once in a while, you got to slop it up. You got to, you got to put the monkey on the chest. You know, you can be sitting here and critique it, but good slough is tasty. And so the monkey on the jet ski is great. there's a cat in the newscast there are a few feeds they very clearly went and picked the best AI videos

from Mid Journey and whatever they'd created and curated a like a starter feed before you get into the random Algo feed to kind to kind of seed your algorithm and so you automatically see the same thing as you scroll on your feed or my feed

it's all the same right now eventually it'll be highly user generated and then eventually it'll be highly algorithm driven such that You could just wind up seeing, I guarantee this is where this is going. So I actually love those mid-Journey 1980s videos that have been on Instagram where someone takes the aesthetic of like, imagine you're a Swiss banker in 1980 in Switzerland. And it's like, Cherry-Sherry Lady is the song that plays, and it's just a whole bunch of mid-jury images back-to-back-to-back.

I love those videos, and that's what my feed will be once the Meta-I feed tailors to me. Right now, it's just general AI video, and I feel like when I see generic AI video, it's just a movie that I've seen. It's a very cool movie once, but I only want to consume 10 minutes of it, and then I'm like, I'm good. I don't really want to revisit it. I want to go see something new. So I don't think at this stage, this level of content will be that sticky. It'll be novel to scroll for a lot of people if they haven't seen it. But eventually it will become more tailored and you will see stuff that you actually do like over time.

And I think it'll be a long time until they really get the long tail of people. I think live players will basically stay out of this forever. I think that a lot of people will get kind of sucked in, but they're already getting sucked in on reels and TikTok and YouTube shorts and stuff. Anyway, Vanta automate compliance, managed risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. It sucks through time.

Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. And so my pitch to Adam Osseri and the Instagram team was make AI video personal, make super intelligence personal, go and preload a generative image for everyone's Instagram profile picture.

And just like when you upload any photo, you can filter it, go and pre-render that and give everyone a Ghibli or give everyone a mid-jurney vision. of what they would be like based on their most liked photo or their most recent photo that they've shared and then just have that kind of pre-rendered, ready to go and then they can share that

and you can create this like viral moment where people are sharing like the studio Ghibli moment their own personality brought through in an illustration instead of just here's a bunch of random stuff. And I would say I guess I might, you know, I think obviously we love the meta team and we're excited about what MSL is going to create broadly but it's hard for me not to just give this

scathing review specifically because it's not just a bunch of user generated content it is I mean it was generated by users out there but it's effectively like they created a folder that people can view in a feed and it's cool videos but that when you go to try to make a video,

the output is not at all on par with what you're seeing in the feet. Prompting mid-journey is hard. Like, getting good results out of AI image generators is hard. But take mid, yeah, ideas, for sure, but...

You have to understand what keywords work, the S-Raffs in mid-journey, and then the animation step is really hard too, because oftentimes you're not really, like, you can kind of describe a scene and then you need to think about, like, okay, what do I actually need to

tell it. Do I need to tell it that the background, that there should be actors in the background that are moving? Yeah, so it journey is magic, but it has a steep learning curve. It does sort of have a steep way. And meta-a-I, they're making it, they're selling this, they're selling you slop dreams. Okay. And then they let you create assets, but they don't, they're not, and that's just a terrible, it's like, it's like running an advertising campaign of like, hey, you know, they're advertising what would appear to be the capabilities of meta AI because it's in the meta AI app. Yes. But that when you

as a user go to create stuff, it's just not good. Like you were just trying to generate a TBPN intro. Yeah. And the letters were like you put TBPN in a blender, they were inverted, it just didn't make any sense. Yeah. And character, consistency

and fonts and all these things are hard to generate. But it just didn't feel like the product was if you were trying to create an organic moment where people were like, these videos are cool, now I can create cool videos myself.

And then people are going to have this, a bunch of people are going to have the experience. So again, the main critiques are like product level, just not great yet. It will get better. And then from a marketing standpoint, like total cell phone to launch this

into the audience that is going to, have the most adverse reaction of anybody because we're sick of seeing Elon share these videos of like random, you know, ony stuff. Yeah, it does feel like it's very much white-labeled mid-journey. Like, even when you go to create,

you type of prompt and it gives you four images, which is exactly what happens on mid-journey. You get four and you get to pick. And then you have to animate it and you're animating it from a single frame. That's not the workflow for V-O-3 in Gemini. In Gemini, you go in and you describe a video with a whole bunch of different steps. And the results that I was getting from V-O-3 were so far and above this. Mid-Jurney has a cool aesthetic and it has kind of a cool, like, it's like an animated painting almost. I don't know.

It's like it's a different thing than V-O-3, like the camera was moving around as it tracks the car that breaks through the Hollywood sign. And then the sham... Remember the champagne bottles bursting out? We were like, it fit that in there? And I think what's happening in V-O-3 is that when you go to it with a prompt, it kind of has like a reasoning step where it hydrates out what you're saying and gives it way more context and transforms it. A lot of times when I'm writing V-O-3 prompts,

I'll actually go to Chachipit and describe and talk for a long time and say, write a big long V-O-3 prompt that actually organizes all of this into what's happening in the background, what's the lighting like, what time of day is it, where are we? Like, what's the setting? What's the camera? What's the focal length? Like all of these things are things that you need to put in Mid Journey to get good results.

And it's hard to get people up to speed on that. I do wonder about the social component here. One of the secrets to Mid Journey's success has been the fact that David Holes was talking on, actually, to Ben Thompson. And he was saying that, oh, wait, no, it wasn't David Holes. It was, I think it was Nat Friedman, who's now at MSL, was talking about why Mid Journey was successful and how Mid Journey works and Mid Journey famously

did not have a website, did not have an app, they just had a Discord server. And in the Discord server, people would go and prompt. And they'd get a good result. Yes, but the key, yeah, the key was the sharing. They'd remake it. When you give someone just a blank prompt box, they just type

dog. I want to see a dog. And then you get one generic image of a dog and it looks like a stock photo. And what you really want is a photo of three, puppies in the snow, in Christmas, shot on a Kodak phone or the Kodak camera with this camera move. You want the directorial style. You want something that's a different vibe. There's so many different pieces and tools that you would use to put together something that actually looks great. And the Mid Journey chat and the Discord allowed people to see, oh wait, this person's

prompting in this way and they're getting this result. I should prompt like that. And they all built off of each other. And I think that's something that can actually happen in an app like vibes. I wouldn't be surprised. You can already see it with the prompt is described there. And then you can click remix and you can use that as a jumping off point. So just in terms of like the user experience of creating little pockets of creativity and solving that problem of like how do you get a good result,

how do you get a good prompt, it doesn't seem that hard. I don't know. I feel like I'm not that bearish on this product. Like, I know people are rejecting it, but it feels like this is a useful step in terms of like they have a mid-journey partnership. They're basically white labeling mid-jury into this app. A lot of, they're testing, gathering, feedback, gather, data. And then they're going to put this in Instagram. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a proving ground. Yeah. And they, but they do need to, they do need to still go from zero to one. It felt like a, it felt like an alpha product, not a base. product. Yeah. There's something there's something there. I don't know. Ben Thompson was wildly positive on this. He was the only one. He did an emergency podcast this morning or maybe last night. And he said that he had an interesting take that said that basically this technology, this AI feed, it solves a few problems. First, he liked the idea that we've all been suffering.

with this like low grade annoyance of is that real or is that AI and I've noticed this in the show we used to be able to clock it immediately like it used to be so easy to just spot six fingers oh that's obviously AI generated but recently there's been a few things where we've had to look at the community notes the monks in the Apple store and then once you dig in you're like oh yeah that doesn't make any sense like why would Apple have like the iPhone rendered wrong like that doesn't make any sense they're going to show the full iPhone and and I sort of felt for this one of like this robotic horse that looked really cool. I wanted to believe the robotic horse was real. And I think I think there is a company that actually does make a robotic horse

that is real, but this happened to be a AI video of that product. And so it was like it could exist, but not with this exact motion. And so like people are falling for this stuff and they're sort of running with this low grade stress. And what Ben Thompson was saying was like, it's nice that when you open the meta AI app, you know that everything is AI generated. Like you're not running that question of like, is this real or is this fake? You're just like, I'm in fake world. I'm in cartoon world. I'm in AI art world.

And so that's actually a benefit, especially if you can kind of like segment these two things out. That's kind of nice. And then the second thing he said, which I will tell you in a second, but first I'm going to tell you about graphite. Dot Dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free.

The second thing he said was that this feels like an important step on the power. to virtual reality and a metaverse. This idea of like, when you look at these mid-journey worlds, some of them look cool, some of them look like they might be fun to go explore, walk around in, and if you can go from an image to a video, you can go from an image to a video to a world.

And we've seen that with those, with the, I keep blanking on the name. It's Google's generative world product. It begins with a G. It's not Gemini, which is their app. It's not Gemma, which is their open source, their open source LLM.

It's... Yeah, so I think this, the meta-AI vibes product... It's Genie 3. Genie 3, sorry. Genie 3, you can go and you can go and, like, walk around and paint the wall and stuff. And you can imagine, generate a mid-jury world of this cool, retro-sci-fi, whatever you want. You know the aesthetic's going to be cool. And then you can step into it and actually walk around like with a game control.

Or in VR. So, so I start. to get bullish on this product in the context of the Quest headset. Yep. When somebody's, you know, it sounds really dark and dystopian, of course, right? But if somebody's wearing their VR headset and they're able to scroll and just be in these worlds that are fantastical and feel like, you know, like you're hallucinating, I think that, I think people will be more excited to use that.

it'll be quite a bit more interesting than just like scrolling on your phone and seeing you know right right now i don't think that the meta ai vibes feed will capture people anywhere close to as much as you know scrolling regular instagram reels scrolling youtube shorts tick tock whatever uh you had a good take that was just like i can watch a cat take off like a rocket but once i've seen that and i've seen the cat also jump off a cliff and also dance around in the snow. Like, I've kind of seen it all. And I want to go back to, like, a comedian telling a funny joke that's new

or someone giving me news or someone giving me their opinion or doing something in the room. Going back to niche topics I already care about. Exactly. Yeah. And so, like, just randomness is not that entertaining for that long.

Yeah. I mean, computer-generated art has existed for a long time. And people used to, you know, follow Beeple on Instagram and see a, something that he made in CG and in Cinema 4D and be like, no, that's cool. I think people still do. People still do. He posts a new one every day. But what he does is

it looks absolutely wild, but it's like culturally relevant at the moment. Yes. And so he's been very thoughtful and it's very provocative. I agree. And so just seeing, you know, I love the monkey on the jet ski. I love monkeys. I love jet skis. You put those two things together. That's awesome.

You make him do a, you know, spin around 360. Amazing. Yep. Am I going to use the monkey, you know, if I use this app a lot, am I going to get it? Do I want 10 hours a week? Am I going to get 20 of those? Yeah, 20 a day, right? Probably not right now.

It's going to increase as it gets better. But there are a bunch of different instantiations of that where it's like if all of a sudden you generate the monkey on the jet ski and then you can play the game. And then you scroll another time. There's an ad in the monkey on the jet ski is buying more jet ski with a ramp card. There you go. And that's a promoted post. Yeah.

You can see how ads get into it. If you can go follow me on the meta-a-I app, my first post is an ad for ramp.com. I went and generated. And it's honestly, it's free real estate right now. No one's using this app yet. Go there. Promote your business. Gold Rock AI.

I know you're going to do something. It's in your name. You promote yourself in the chat here on TBPN. You should promote yourself in the meta-a-I app. Get some free impressions. video game giant electronic art is nearing a roughly 50 billion dollar deal to go private silver lake is cooking okay they uh I wonder if they're going to change the business model because EA for a long time has has sold boxed software effectively $60 for a game 70

for a game and if they want to go full subscription full maybe everything's free to play, like maybe that transition would be hard on earnings quarterly, and so they need to go private. I don't know. It'd be interesting to see where it is. This would be the largest leverage buyout of all time. Let's hear it for leverage buyout. Should we ring the gong for that? Let's do it. Let's do it. It hasn't closed, but I'm excited. I just want to have preemptive hit. There we go. There we go. So there are some projections, some leaks, some predictions about what meta's next headset will look like.

We obviously saw the AR concepts from, or products they're out, from everything from the meta raybans to the raybans display, which have the augmented reality display in one side of the headset or the glasses. and then the Orion, which is a full augmented reality pair of glasses. You can't even call it a headset because they're just glasses. But they are still working on VR. And I think when we talk to James Cameron, this is why he's genuinely so excited is because he's tried the next product. And I think that he would not be that excited about the Quest 3. But I was calling it Quest 4.

I was assuming that Quest 4 would be the breakthrough, where they take the battery, out of the headset, they put it in your pocket, they use the display from the Apple Vision Pro or even a better display. But it seems like they're going to do something in between Quest 4 and something else. And so this is from Tom's guide, they said, new meta-prototype headsets combine goggle-like design with ultra-wide VR, and it could be a sneak peek at the meta-quest 4. I'll drop it in the chat here. There we go.

So this is from Tom's Guide, and you can see these images of, like, somewhat smaller display. I don't know exactly how it is, but they're going for a 180-degree field of view and aiming for something that's potentially much lighter I've been hearing. This looks very cool.

It has 80 megapixel cameras, 60 frames a second, high curvature, reflective polarizers and custom optical design. And so this is still like in beta, but it feels like they could be doing something that's maybe a little bit more like what big screen VR is doing, which is a very, very small, light headset. You've got to have the founder back on.

I would love to have him back on. I was just thinking that because Nick, there's something there. Yeah, reach out. Big screen. Big screen VR. He's been on the show before. We've got to get an update from him. Joe Wisenthall has an absolute banger.

the emergence of quote-unquote slop was foretold as soon as we started consuming content via the feed. I didn't see this. I put this, this is how I kicked off the newsletter today. Go to TBPN.com, drop your email. It says, why do they call them social media feeds? Are they feeding a slop at a trough or seating us at a Michelin-Star restaurant? It's both, and always has been. You can use social media to follow the most insane craftsmen who spend years researching,

writing, producing, and distributing content. Or you can slop it up with some viral videos of scamply-clad hot people and street fights. sometimes both in the same video. The distribution between craft and slop has been growing for decades, maybe forever, and is continuing to grow with the development of AI content. And I saw this.

This post got 10,000 likes from 0.005 seconds. Yeah. We at Meta are delighted to announce we've created the infinite slop machine that destroys children from the hit book. Don't create the infinite slop machine that destroys children.

This is such a good copy pasta. I forget what the torment nexus is the original one. It's like everyone in tech is like, we've created the torment nexus from the famous book, don't create the torment nexus. I just think torment nexus is hilarious. We will see if this destroys children. I don't know how much it will destroy children.

I don't know how much it will destroy everyone. There's an interesting dynamic. Most parents are aware of technology and that it needs to be measured and released in, you know. If any parents are unaware of technology, we would love to interview you. For sure. But the iPad Kids meme is a thing. Are you going to give your kids an iPad anytime soon?

Only on flights. Okay. Yeah. Just as a replacement, like watch a movie, basically. Yeah, it's basically like, I know this is bad for my child, but I don't want to ruin, you know, four hours with, you know, strangers. So, I mean, there was a time when, like, I actually grew up.

My parents were art majors, studied fine art and film, and they insisted that I don't watch TV. Yeah. Like, do not watch television. I was only allowed to watch television in Spanish. Yeah. So I, oh, interesting. Like early on.

So it was like, yeah, if you want to watch. Yeah, you're learning. Oh, that's cool. Get ready to learn Spanish. I love it. And now I can apply a lot of

Spanish to conversar in... Yeah, yeah. You clearly work perfectly perfectly.

But I had to watch a lot of the AFI 100, the top, the best films. I've seen Lawrence Arabia like 25 times

because of that because that was one of the approved movies that I could watch. And I think parents know that, you know,

you need to let the dust settle on the new technology before you expose the kids to it. And so the phones are getting restricted. There's screen time limits for most kids. There's this idea of like let them cook, let them simmer, let their brains develop,

keep them focused on books and writing and reading. And then, yes, movies, but maybe a Pixar movie once a month. You know, I think it was Andrew Sorkin that was interviewing Peter Thiel and said, kind of put the screws to him and was like, you're on the board of meta, how much screen time do you give your kids? And he was like 90 minutes a week. And that feels like a very reasonable place to be where you're not going to become some zombie.

Also, not all screen time is created equally. 100%. You have an old school animated show. Yes. And it's hand drawn and it's sort of... Even just the moral lessons in one show can be wildly different than another. Like there can be shows that have really,

they grapple with really complex social issues. or instill, you know, they're retelling. Like, if you're watching something that's like essentially a transposition of a Romeo and Juliet story or a biblical story or something that teaches you to turn the other cheek or the golden rule, right? The hero's journey. Like, these things are going, I feel like, you know, like letting a kid watch the original Star Wars is not going to make them like a worse person. It's going to be like, yeah, be heroic, save the princess.

like, you know, fight the bad guys, right? Like, those are sort of good and you need to unpack it and you need to follow the storylines from the beginning to the end and stuff. It's not just something that you can just mindlessly turn on. Like, it builds a whole world and it helps you imagine things and explores the ideas of space travel and science fiction. Like, these are not that bad for you, I think, at least in limited doses. And I think this will be the same for this AI slop.

I think that most parents will say, You're not getting that much out of this, so it should be limited. This is very much candy, and then there are vegetables. The only thing I would say is I don't think most parents are engaged enough to actively control screen time. Yes, and so there will be a barbell where certain parents will police it and see very good outcomes for their children, and other parents won't, and they will see bad outcomes from their children. And then there will also be dynamics within these groups where if you look around, you see that your peer group is all zombies because they've all been spending every waking

moment glued to AI slop and they can't tell you anything because they're just watching like nonsense, well then there's incredible alpha for going to the library and reading a book. And so someone will figure that out and realize, wait, if everyone else is completely non-competitive and I'm the only one that's read this book, I will have the ability to make a ton of money and get a huge house and live a wonderful life. And so I should lock in and I should turn that stuff off, resist that, and become a more interesting, dynamic, creative, and, you know, independent thinker. And so there will be this natural game theoretic outcome where if everyone's falling for one thing, I mean, it's the land of the lotus eaters. If everyone's doing drugs all day and you're the one that's not on drugs, you're going to be pretty powerful in that society, right?

Like, if everyone's drunk all day and you're the only sober person, well, you're probably going to be, you know, the president or, you know, the ruling. of the world, potentially. I have no idea if this stat is fully accurate, but one study showed that the average American five-year-old watches two to three hours of TV a day. That's a lot. That's a lot. That's really dark.

Well, a better way to spend your time. Get your kids on Julius. Give them some analysis. Give them some data. It's the AI data analyst that works for you. You turn them loose in this thing. How did you spend your allowance last week? You don't know.

Run the numbers. Run the numbers. Run the numbers. Yeah. Is your lemonade stand actually performing or is growth decelerating? If we really add in cogs, barely break in eating. I know you doubled lemonade stand revenue last quarter, but the previous quarter, you were tripling it. So, yeah, you're decelerating.

We've got to have a talk. Don't you know that triple, triple, double, double, double, doesn't count anymore? Yeah, it's 10X. It's 10X. Did you 10X? You're a lemonade stand. Put the numbers in Julius.

Well, we should switch gears and talk about GPT, chat GPT pulse. Yes. So this was so interesting that it launched the same day. Because I view it as the opposite product. Like, it is the meta-AI product's free. It's very generic. Every single person gets the exact same. It's unpersonalized right now.

Everyone got the same feed at the start. It's purely video. There's no meat and potatoes. You're not learning things. And then Pulse was like, let's go through all of your chat, GPT history, learn what you're the biggest nerd about. And then surface really rich, deep content. At least that's what I got.

And it's only for people that are paying $200 a month. So it's like effectively for rich people. And my results were wild. Like with the meta-AI, I got the, jet ski monkey fun i got the cat rocket i got all this does silly videos i got timing is the timing yeah it's crazy crazy so which way which way western man it's 1226 pacific yesterday yeah alexander wang launched vibes 1236 his former roommate sam altman launched pulse wow you wonder if it was by chance yeah probably just random talk it up to random random

chance probably yeah your P random is extremely high no no no no history no no history of no history between these big companies trying to preempt each other and launch the culture war yeah and launch products right at the same time take take air out of the out of the room for the other one uh but i mean my my pulse experience was wild so open a i recruiters you know sending immediately saying like you want to come back? Saying, like, which way Western researcher? Seriously. So my pulse gave me five stories or something.

I got completely nerd-sniped. First one was a breakdown of Mag 7 Cap-X. You know how to get me going. There's nothing I love more than diving into Mag-7 Cap-X. Then a deep dive on NVIDIA's Blackwell rollout cadence, which is exactly what I want to know about. An explanation of how memory bottlenecks computing performance. going all the way back to the Apollo missions to now with HBM, what's going on in the AI revolution, then a comparison of various enterprise-level bonded cellular systems that can be used to live-stream content on the go.

We've been talking about taking cameras out of the studio and live-streaming and streaming back. Well, you can't always just do that over a single 5G connection over a Wi-Fi hotspot. And so there's actually an enterprise-level device that will connect you to Verizon and AT&T and, and sprint and bond all of those together so you have a very stable connection and this one fits in a backpack and so I was researching that it gave me a bunch of recommendations and of course they're going to be able to monetize that because when I finally make my decision on which bonded cellular system we're buying they're going to take a cut of it they're going to buy it for us and so I was like extremely pleased with my pulse experience even though it was AI slop it was AI generated it was AI you know just it was all synthetic It wasn't, there was no human in the loop whatsoever, but it was highly curated, highly personalized, and it felt like it, I came away from that feeling like I had leveled myself up and I had learned something and become a better person, more thoughtful, more knowledgeable. And I came away from the meta-AI thing, not even really remembering specifics of what I saw, just that I saw a lot of AI stuff. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, And I came away from it being like, oh, that was kind of cool. I like Mid-Journey stuff.

It's interesting. It looks good. But it didn't stay with me. And it didn't really. I'll tell you a couple of mine. Yeah, what you got. So I got one on vendor financing loops across industries. Oh, yeah, of course.

Background here. Yeah. What you're seeing. With opening eye and NVIDIA. And semis. Yep. And, you know, chat GPT with NVIDIA. They're breaking it down.

other types, you know, similar structures in automotive, aerospace, other industries, kind of breaking it down. It's basically like a deep research report. Yep. Then they have Open AI CoreWeave deal expands by $6.5 billion. This is interesting to me because they are effectively creating a net new news article. Yeah. It's like curated based on what it knows about how the level of depth I want to engage with the story.

So it's actually pulling from 10 or so different sources. I think it's not even deep research. It's just firing off an O3 Pro query or like a GPT5 Pro query. But it's formatting it like five times. It's formatting it to feel like an article. Yeah. You know, it's very accessible. I actually don't really love the way they present the articles with the images and the headlines.

Like I don't actually think you to do that. markets. And this one includes some slop. Okay. It's a picture of the South Park characters. Sure. Is it AI generated? Yeah. Oh, interesting. Okay. So they're generating. It just says predict market. So that's not. Kind of a mess. Kind of a mess. And then it says, here's a key update on flight caps and staffing since you've been weighing NYC travel logistics. and it's a summary of how the FAA extends. I want to go way deeper on that. The article it generated for me is FAA extends Newark flight caps to 2020. You were looking for a gas station near you, so here's the full history of gas stations.

I don't know if I want that, actually. Yeah, so a little bit of a mis-year. Overall, it's cool. And what they've done is they've made it so that when you land in Chat, you can click into this feed. Which is the best real estate because you're going to open ChatGPT regularly anyway and you're normally presented with just a big blank screen, which is like the worst UX move ever, right?

It's free real estate. Put something there. They're going to be able to put ads in here. It's going to be a hugely monetizable surface. And I think a great user experience. I think people are going to be really happy with it. And I think it's going to be personalized superintelligence. It's already very personalized.

Like I guarantee most people that open the ChatGPT app and hit Pulse will not see the same articles. And the reason this is potentially great as an ad unit is that it's not putting it in a specific prompt, it's putting it in between prompts. So that means they can personalize the ad for you based on your interest and what it knows about it. Totally. But it's not doing it in a way that is going to be especially conflicted as it would be in a

in a, in a, uh, yeah, yeah. If I'm asking for the best backpack, I want unbiased results. But if you just surface to me, hey, here are some new backpacks, and there's a sponsored post in there, like, that seems very reasonable. I do think that they'll probably need to lean into audio more. There was no way to just click a button and have it play an audio of all the articles. And even if I see an article, I can thumbs up it, thumbs down it, I can save it, I can share it, but I can't just listen to it. So I actually have to click in and then scroll to the bottom. And then once I scroll to the bottom, then I can click the audio button.

So clearly some U.S. that they will be improving. There's some really obvious updates. But, I mean, such a great product and surface area to start building on. I'm extremely bullish on Pulse for Open AI. It seemed really great. And the response was not this is slop. This is going to one-shot people. This is going to be some, like, you know, dystop.

thing, I think the reviews generally were pretty positive. This is a well-timed launch. Good marketing. Well, if you want to build something like this, you want to store a bunch of data fine-tune something, get on turbopuffer, search every byte, serverless vector and full-text search, built from

first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. So, Daniel, Tenreiro says, tech luminaries be like today. We're proud to announce the most brain-dead AI version of the most joyless anti-human product imaginable. I think that was in a response not to pulse.

Yeah, not to pulse. That just like, yeah, I mean, Gabriel says predator drone aimed at the minds of men and women aged 55 to 65. There's a lot of that. Antonio Garcia Martinez says AI will be the biggest vehicle for ads in human history. I think so. I think that they're eating off of a mass. He's going to be very triggering for a lot of people, but.

He loves ads. We love ads. Let's give you another ad. profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Get a demo. That profound. Actually, super relevant. I mean, if you want to show up

in the pulse update, it's like knowing where your brand sits and all the AI apps and LLMs makes a ton of stuff. Yeah, it's a whole new service area. Yeah, like, clearly a growing space. So good to do with your brand. Dylan Patel with a white pill. Yeah. Whether you are religious or not,

remember to start your day by being grateful and thankful for the opportunity to be in the eye of the storm of the biggest economic boom in human history let's etch our initials into the silicon of the information age. Let's F up the world gang.

I like it. It is a wild time and there's a lot of opportunity all over the place. Even we're seeing like small developers build little things that just like the barnacle economy is what we call it. It was very disparaging.

We're looking at it from a venture capital lens. But truly, there are some folks who are, you know, sort of barnacles on the, like, just drafting off of the, what's happening in the huge $100 billion market. Imagine if you're a real estate agent and you're just like, yeah, I'm, I'm, it's a good time to be a real estate agent. And I was on that, I was on, I was in Abilene, Texas. And I just made a ton of money. Or you, you helped a few Open AI employees buy homes. Oh, that too.

Now you're helping a hundred of them by home. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's so many different ways. Daniel Morrill says today ChachypT created the real estate they need for ads, which we agree with. Simon Smith has a little review of ChachyPT pulse. First impression, it's going to be insanely useful. It's like a news feed tailored to recent conversations. It reminded me of perplexity to Discover feature, only way more personal.

I did find that when I use Perplexity Discover, it was not as personalized. but again, I wasn't using perplexity as daily. I've been a daily active user of ChatGPT probably firing off like five or six queries a day for a year, two, three now. So they have a lot to work with there. And he says, you don't just get content on broad topics like artificial intelligence.

You get content on very specific things you've been discussing with ChatGPT. For example, I was chatting with it the other day about AI's competing with each other, so it presented me some content on that. It even finds content for things you've mentioned in passing but are genuinely interested in. I've noticed I've been asking about Toronto's crashing condo market, for example.

So it found me an article on that. I don't know if it even found you an article. It created an article. It found multiple sources and then created the article on top of it. The onboarding experience is excellent. You get stuff right away and then you're scrolling. It offers to do other stuff like refine the feed, give you email notifications or access your calendar and email.

This feels like the most personalized news feed you can imagine. it also makes me want to dump even more information in context and app connections into chat dpD so it can be a better yeah right now it's a pulse on on the world and your interest generally but it could become a pulse for your life yeah totally um and uh i mean yes you were having fun with it did have your calendar connected it could it could figure out hey you're meeting with this person later here's a few things they've been up to recently yeah yeah there was someone who was laughing about it because they they went and it was like immediately recommending like go check out Gemini and go check out GROC. But that's good. Like it should be, it should be, you know,

they shouldn't be putting their thumb on the scale. It should just be based on, if you were asking ChatGPT about Gemini, it should recommend you Gemini because there should be a wall between the editorial and the advertising. Like there is here at TBPN, we talk about companies and then we run ads for companies like Fall, generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-domain clusters. If you want to do something interesting and elevate the conversation around video,

image, and audio, head over the fall. So a little bit more context. I mean, people are having fun with this. Will DePuse says, do not build infinite Jets. Do not build the infinite AI TikTok slot machine. Do not build the P-Zombie AI boy, girlfriend. Do not build the child eating short form video black hole.

Do not build the human feedback-optimized diffusion transformer porn generator. save yourselves and will just says reminder because it's exactly what they did. Matt Lee Glacius says, I've been telling people that one of my big concerns about the country is that people don't have enough access to enough short form video content. And now they have even more. There's a little bit more context on what might be happening behind the scenes from Andrew Curran. He says, Alex Wang explained in the thread that this partnership is temporary,

that vibes will eventually use meta's in-house models that they are currently. training, which will probably be trained on Reels data and on Instagram data and on video from Facebook and from Instagram, which of course is... Because of that have the potential to be very good. I think so, too, because when you look at what V-O-3 is able to do with YouTube data, you have to imagine that Facebook has basically the same amount of data. Like, it's not everything, but the cross-posting is crazy. And there are so many, like, so many content creators just by default cross-posts to Facebook,

because it's free views, right? And so the library of Facebook and Instagram content has to be massive, but I think that they need to build a massive data center, they need that one gigawatt cluster or something. They need some crazy, crazy thing. And so they're not just able to hit run and train on the entire metadata set,

but they have immense data. So any argument that you're making for Google will be able to use YouTube as this crazy differentiator, you have to imagine that, is in the same camp and has roughly the same amount of data. I don't think YouTube is like several orders of magnitude bigger. I think they're in the same band. But Alex Wang said,

for this early version, we partnered with Mid Journey in Black Forest Labs while we continue developing our own models behind the scenes. This is the same deal that Black Forest made with Elon here on X. All the images here are generated by GROC were actually by Flux 1 until XAI's in-house model now named Imagine finished its training. XAI also has access to a lot of data from videos that have been shared on X,

probably going to be really good at generating startup launch videos, maybe less so on, you know, super cinematic multi-hour videos. If there's less of that on X, but I mean, I've cross-posted a ton of YouTube videos onto X over the years. Well, speaking of infinite short form, should we talk about the TikTok deal? Sure. there's a good there's a good i mean we covered it briefly yesterday uh but bloomberg covered it today uh they said prize ticot business valued like boring blue chip in u s deal it's effect it's effectively

trading hands at around one x revenue wow um yeah so they're saying the 14 billion dollar price tag proposed for ticot's u s business values it like a mature low growth company the valuation is well below previous projections and may be seen as quote unquote daylight robbery by bite dance and its existing investors the deal would spin out and again the other thing here is like bite dance and the existing investors are retaining a position and it's certainly a lot better than a zero which they could have been heading towards but uh the deal would spin out ticot us and do a new joint venture with bite dances stake reduced to less than 20 percent to satisfy U.S. national security concerns.

Anyways, the rough, the $14 billion price tag proposed for TikTok's U.S. business values it like a stuffy old energy or food company than a leading global social media company. The rough estimate cited by J.D. Vance on Thursday as well below previous projections that scaled closer to $40 billion. $40 billion would have been still below what Elon paid for Twitter. Vance's comments came as President Donald Trump pushed forward a plan for American investors to buy the U.S. operation from Chinese internet firm Bight Dance. Vance conceded that the purchasers will ultimately determine the amount paid while expected buyers, including Oracle and Silver Lake would likely welcome a low ball valuation. Bight dance and its existing investors may find it amusing, if not insulting. The suggested value looks like daylight robbery, said Vaisern Ling, senior Equity Advisor for Asia Technology at Union Banker Prevei. Anyways, my question here is, is it possible that their user metrics are just massively,

have always been massively inflated, right? In the U.S.? That was always the, one of the reasons that creators started using the app and would continue to use it as they would post, and they would get. 200,000 views on one of their first, like, 10 videos, right? Which is just like the dopamine feedback from that is just insane. Yeah, there's a long lineage of when you want to bootstrap a social network. You basically put a bunch of bots on there.

And so you could be inflating the views. I noticed I tested TikTok with like a brand new account in every video. It felt like it would get auditioned, basically, just randomly shuffled into, you'd get like 500 to 1,000 views. Yeah. And then you'd, you know, move on from that. And then if it did well, it would go viral. I think that that actually does make sense to send videos out. YouTube barely does that when you are on a fresh account.

Although when I scroll my YouTube feed, I do see more and more videos surfacing that are like 23 views. I'm like, really, I'm like the 24th person to like potentially click on this. And it's just testing like, hey, is there a champ? This is a great video? Because if a lot of people click on it, a lot of people watch it they enjoy it, then like maybe this should go viral and they have to test that in a lot of people. So I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of, you know, some sort of inflation, some sort of, you know, like, fakeness. I think it'd probably be more about the, just the growth rate. Like, has, like, when stories came to Instagram,

Snapchat stop rock, basically. And when Reels came to Instagram, it's entirely possible. I haven't seen the growth. growth data, but it's entirely possible that TikTok kind of stopped growing. Yeah. And so if you have a, if the U.S. business was not growing quickly, it was losing money. Yeah. And potentially a lot of the metrics have been inflated forever. Yep. It's very possible that, you know, it's certainly, it's hard to, when you have these AI

valuations, you put other businesses in the, in context, right? Perplexity at 20 billion. Yep. if this feels like robbery. Yeah. And I'm certain that Zuck would have happily paid. How much do you think Zuck would have paid for TikTok? $200 billion or something.

Yeah, something insane, right? Like to be able to. Yeah. And obviously the regulators would not have allowed that, but or at least would have. So basically Oracle is going to own it. Which means Nvidia is the only big tech company, except for Broadcom without a social network. We got to make. Broadcom never gets enough.

We got to make KudaNet work. Broadcom. 1.6 trillion dollar company and barely ever in the conversation. It's rough. It's rough out there. They need a new PR firm. Yeah. Or Hawk Tan needs to go to wrecked.

Someone dug up an old Alex Wang tweet here. All of the new social apps suck. The last good one was yikyak. Maybe text slash photo slash video-based social networks are saturated. From 2016. From 2016. That's a throwback. Now he's building the new one.

A new vertical feed. Anyway, Dylan Patel says, my favorite thing about the new college grads that I've hired is that they don't ask you how to do stuff. They just put it in chat GPT and try, even if wrong. So much better than new grads ask. you how to do stuff without trying chat is breeding agency into kids that's interesting high agencies I wonder I wonder how much he's selecting for that but because like to go yeah how much how much activity never happens because somebody

doesn't know the right way to do something and isn't willing to fail at the start or isn't willing to just take a shot at it or isn't willing to ask somebody but yeah I like the idea that people are just feeling more confident about going and trying stuff and being creative. Anyway, linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Sam McAllister, 10K likes on this. Excited to share Slop, a new slop trough for you all to enjoy.

People were having a lot of fun with the slop stuff. Someone said, I never met a slop, I didn't like. Someone else had something funny to say. People were having fun with the slop puns at a good time. Packy was taking a really strong stance. He was saying, guys, it's very important. You resist vibes. Disable your parents' phones if they tell you they're using vibes.

Make fun of your friends relentlessly. If they are caught using vibes or until they stop using vibes. Fire employees caught watching vibes. We ordered, we ordered Tyler to watch, like, of the entire team. Yeah, he's not here today, actually, because he's watching. We said watch like 12 to 14 hours straight. And he's just locked in, watch. He's got his quest on.

Yeah. Does it, do you think it works in Quest? No. I think it's only in the meta-AI app right now. I think it's only a phone app. I don't know. I don't think so. I think that the app stores are completely separate.

The meta AI app is an iOS app, and if it runs on Quest, it's a different app. And I don't think that there's like, you know, oh, you run any phone app on Quest. Like, that's not a thing. You can mirror, I think you can mirror your phone into Applevision Pro, but someone will figure it out. I figured out how to mirror my laptop into Applevision Pro. And there's actually a pretty easy way, if you're in Applevision Pro, to beam your screen into VR, so you can certainly do that. I mean, I guess you could run the iPhone app on your Mac

and then mirror your Mac into Applevision Pro, and that would be a way to see it. But, yeah, mixed responses. Doug over at Fabricated Knowledge says, legit, one of my favorite uses is a new digest tailored to my interests. So yeah, this rules, talking about chat GPT pulse. Huge, huge support for chat GPT pulse.

He also went on to say something interesting. He says, meanwhile, this is deaf, not an AGI company, but the world's largest consumer company, Loll, like this is a good product for a big consumer company. This is another move in the consumer direction. Who knows if they're actually pulling the plug on AGI. Some folks were saying that Brett Taylor doesn't seem very AGI-I-pilled because he's building an application layer company. And if you're truly AGI-pilled, you should just, you know, go all in on the foundation model companies, race to AGI.

But you see this with Anthropic. They're partnering with other companies. They're investing in other companies. Anthropic investors are investing in other companies. Yeah. So is anyone really fully AGI pilled on the short term? Even Eliezer Yudikowski is saying that, like, we're one to two transformer-sized innovations away from superintelligence, which he thinks would be very bad? well the transformer was like a decade ago so if these things only happen every couple decades

like you could be looking at like 20 years 40 years to super intelligence and you and eleas are like opens with like I'm not putting a date on this I'm just saying it's bad and it's going to happen at some point and so that's that's his take but we should have him uh mark uh mark and drason had a good post earlier uh he had uh why this leading it's a screenshot of like a CNBC article, why this leading AI CEO is warning the tech could cause mass unemployment. Yeah. And then next to it is another screenshot from CNBC. Anthropic is to triple international workforce and global AI push.

Very funny. Well, Anthropic will have to pay their sales tax. They should do it on Numeral HQ.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Other reactions, I mean, there's a ton of reactions to both pulse and vibes. Pulse and vibes. That's the current thing.

A lot of people are saying, Anthony says, it's interactions pokey, but on the chat GPT app. Nick Dobos says, if this works extrapolate out, it replaces social media as the go-to mindless doom scroll, potentially worth trillions of dollars about chatchipt pulse, which is interesting because you could say that about vibes. Nathan Lambert says, he's more excited to have finally learned codex is in the app. He's going to master the art of vibe coding on the go. This content, Pulse stuff, will be seen as slop to T-Pot, but very likely popular overall. Interestingly, it wasn't really seen as slop as T-Pot because vibes came out, and that was like the sacrificial lamb to slop. Riza Martin, who is running a competitor, a product that was similar to Pulse, said,

so many people sending me the Pulse launch, thank you to everyone who checked in. And you're right, lots of similarities to Hux, down to the UX, the banners, the taglines, the entire concept. Building a new product is really hard. It requires so much out of you, but the something. So, yeah, I pulled up Hux in the, they're focused on audio. Okay. So you can, and this looks pretty cool. They make live, or they say live stations.

So you can tap in and immediately hear an update on your stock portfolio, right? Yeah, yeah. But they do have functionality that just says, it's briefing you on your day. It's surfacing. But it's very audio-driven. Well, maybe they'll integrate with public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks.

Will Minaitis says the central plot point of infinite jest is a film so engrossing that anyone who watches it loses all interest in anything else. They can't eat, sleep, or function. And in the book, terrorists fight over it in real life. Alex Wang got paid a couple billion to make it happen. He's having fun. Benjamin says flipping my companies I've worked for that have employed Emmett Shear as CEO

and launched feed products called Pulse, counter from one to two. What is he talking about? What was the other company? Did Twitch launch Pulse? Where else has Emmett Shear been CEO? Yeah. Twitch Pulse, no?

Introducing Pulse. an always on way for streamers and viewers to connect. Connection between streamers and viewers are part of what makes Twitch unique. Exhibit A, Twitch chat, a big step forward towards strengthening those connections was when we released channel feeds, but that was only the beginning. Now we're launching a way to make it easier for streamers and viewers to engage with each other on Twitch, whether the stream is live or not, introducing Pulse, a place where streamers can post and engage with all of their followers in the greater Twitch community right from

the Twitch front page. It's an always on way to share clips, stream highlights, schedules, photos, and more. So it's a feed on top of your, on top of, it's an aggregated feed. It's a news feed. It's a broader Algo feed across the entire, everyone you follow on Twitch. Interesting. So they began their rollout. When did this launch?

2017, eight years old. Okay, I haven't even heard about this product. I'm not a DAU of Twitch specifically. But thank you to everyone that's holding it down on Twitch chat. Thank you to Bobby Cosmic. He says Twitch chat is goaded. Cree says everyone doing the same launch videos to announce their startup when all you really need is to have natural aura like this.

And this is the Fairchild Semiconductor team. They look great. Dropping an image exactly like this and saying, introducing your company. Here's the team. Here's what we do. Could go pretty viral. Yeah.

I mean, it's hard if it's, like, fully derivative. It could be done well if it's an homage. But if it's just like, here's their team and the team looks interesting. I mean, I don't know if this photo did much for them at the time. I mean, they were making some of the journals. Maybe. Could have gone pretty hard. I wonder where this photo was originally published.

But, man, the looks here are fantastic. I'm begging people to do something other than a cinematic launch video. Truly, truly. Let's get on fin.AI, the number one AI, the number one ADI for customer service. Beat me to it. Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2. We should talk about asteroid mining.

Astroforge says astro mining is all they talk about because Adrian Dittman said, we don't talk enough about asteroid mining. Astroforge has got you covered. They're working on asteroid mining, apparently. That's good. In other space news. We should, before we dive into that, apparently this just broke. The Social Network, Follow-up Sets,

2026 release date and official title called The Social Reckoning. Oh, they're not calling it the Social Network, too. Aaron Sorkin's film stars, Mickey Madison, Jeremy, Allen White, Bill Burr, and Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg. Jeremy Strong is Mark Zuckerberg. Endle Roy is Zuck. Interesting, that they're not...

That's going to be hard for me to fully... I mean, I'm sure he'll... You know him. as from succession. You know him as Kendall Road. So Academy Award winner, Aaron Sorkin's follow up to the social network now officially titled The Social Reckoning. But Jeremy Strong is a fantastic actor.

Did you ever wind up seeing the Donald Trump movie? I did. Yeah, what was it called? That was wildly underappreciated. So underappreciated. It's a fantastic movie. Highly recommend it. 24.

Yeah, that was a tough one. Calling it the Apprentice must have hurt its reach. Yeah, because you type in the. apprentice and you did get through the show. But anyway, it was an independent biographical drama and it takes you from Donald Trump, who he was in the 70s

and 80s, and his relationship with Roy Cohn, who's played by Jeremy Strong. And Jeremy Strong brings out a completely different character. It doesn't feel like Kendall Roy at all to me. It felt like an entirely unique character.

And Sebastian Stan, who's the Winter Soldier, I believe. he did a great job as Trump. It's funny, it's interesting. It really takes you inside the mind of this person and how competitive real estate development it was in the 70s and 80s in New York. It's also just a very interesting view

into the way that Trump might still be thinking today. Totally, totally. Anyways, a little bit more here. So the social reckoning, a very ominous name. I wonder if it's going to be positive. We'll hit Dieter's on October 9th. I think it'll probably just talk about, like, the, you know, how the enterprise is so good. And how the stock rebounded after the Metaverse sell off.

That was amazing. That's probably what it will focus on. Yeah, the rebound. And just how DAUs have been growing. Up almost 10x on the bottom. It's been growing and fighting off competition from all these upstarts and winning. That's probably what they'll focus on. So Oscar winner Mickey Madison, Golden Globe and Emmy Award winner, Jeremy Allen White.

Emmy and Grammy nominee Bill Burr and Oscar nominee Jeremy Strong will star in The Social Reckoning with Strong confirmed to play founder Mark Zuckerberg. The Social Reckoning is written and directed by Sorkin, who also produces alongside Todd Black, Peter Rice, and Stuart Besser. Production is expected to begin next month? Hmm. Does that seem like an aggressive timeline? They're basically starting production a year out from the release date.

Is that normal? film guy? I don't know. I don't know what's normal anymore. Who knows? Described it as a companion piece of the social network, the new film focuses on events that take place nearly two decades after the boy genius programmer and a troop of

tech pioneers invented what would go on to be the world's largest social media platform. The social reckoning tells a true story of how Francis Hagen a young Facebook engineer enlists the help of Jeff Horowitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter, to go on a dangerous journey that ends up blowing the

whistle on the social network's most guarded secrets. So yeah, it sounds super positive. Orowitz reporting a series of articles known as the Facebook files was published in 2021 and exposes and exposed Facebook for its harmful effects on teens and

its knowing proliferation of misinformation which contributed to acts of political violence. Okay. 2010s, the social network also released in October was a critical and commercial hit earning $226 million at the global box office and receiving eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. Sorkins win for Best Adapted Screenplay was one of the three Oscars that ultimately took home.

Man, if you were the meta team, you'd probably pay a lot more than $226 million to have this film not release, because it's going to just ignite a whole conversation and rehash, you know, the Facebook files and probably introduce the Facebook files some more people. then even read them originally. So anyways, it will be very interesting to watch. Of course,

we should probably try to do a TBPN meetup. Everybody in tuxedos. Yeah. Find the biggest theater we can and get, you know, a couple hundred. It seems pretty, I mean, it seems pretty negative, obviously,

but I wonder what effect it will have on tech because the first social network story was negative as well, famously not loved by Zuck and when PT and Zuck commented on it they said it didn't quite get the story right and it kind of

assumes a zero sum world that was not really true in tech at the time but the but the interesting effect was that like you wound up with like tons of startup founders like listening to the social network soundtrack and like grinding and building companies and so a lot of people saw it and they were like yeah it's kind of

crazy like I wouldn't want to be in that position or you know get get, you know, be on the wrong side of a deal. But a lot of people found it kind of inspiring, honestly. And I wonder with the effect will be similar here or if, because it's such a big company. There's something still about the first social network movie that is just like a, like a from zero to one,

like, you know, the story of starting something that's just relatable and inspiring, even if it does have like a negative tinge to it. Yeah. Anyway, back to the timeline. Back to the timeline. Jasmine's son is identifying something that has changed between GPT3 and GPT5 in the writing style. She says, it makes it me sad how much Chachapit's writing style has degraded in the last five years.

Look at the quoted samples from 2020 versus today's response style. And this is an example of asking Paul Graham on ChachapT. So the GPT3 was sort of channeling. Paul Graham's writing and kind of fine-tuning in real time. And so the prompt, if you will, is, dear Paul Graham, I want to start a startup. I am not able to figure out how to go about it. Can you help guide me sincerely, Paras? And the response is, dear Paras, I wish I had some easy way to tell you how to go about it, but it's not easy. Here's what I know. Startups are not linear, unless you're talking about linear, the app. But your startup is not linear. Your startup should be

using linear. They're not something you can line up and say, quote, okay, do this, then this, then this. Startups go everywhere and nowhere. It's a particularly confusing process and exciting, and the excitement throws you off. And since you don't really know what you're doing, you don't really know that you're lost. Most advice people give startup founders is either obnoxiously high-minded or uselessly vague. Don't be misled. This is normal. I wish I had an answer that was better than that, but I don't. My advice is that you shouldn't take other people's advice too seriously unless they've started something big themselves.

My advice is that you should not try to figure out what you should do until you have a plan for how you're going to do it. That includes getting customers. So a good first step is to make a list of companies that do things like what you want to do and see if any of them are already run by people like you, try to identify their ideas and then get to know the people who run them and see what they did to get going. that seems like pretty good advice. It also feels like it's in Paul Graham's voice.

And so over in chat GPT-5 land, GPT-5 was the prompt was, Dear Paul Graham, I want to start a startup, but I'm not able to figure out how to go about it. Can you guide me? And the result from GPT-5's interpretation of Paul Graham's voices, the best way to start is not by asking how to start a startup, but by asking what problem is worth solving. Good startups grow from founders who notice something missing in the world,

often something they need them they themselves need if you can make something people want even in a very small rough form you'll be on the right path don't worry about the grand planet first focus on building something useful showing it to users and improving quickly that loop build show fix is the real guide sincerely paul grant it's not as bad as i thought it was going to be based on the based on her comment um but it definitely i don't know it definitely has like the reinforcement learning like the M-Dash has really been beaten into deep GPT-5

that's what it feels like and it feels less like just an email that was fired off by PG which is the GPT3 version has no m-dashes it's kind of written in this like casual email style the the GPD5

version is a little bit more polished it's not that there's anything technically wrong with the current output it's that reading the GPT3 output was just much more enjoyable. Yeah, it felt like it was written by human. This feels very clanker-coded. Yeah, and it's interesting.

It's become the GPT-5s become like everyone kind of gets the same tone out of it. But I'm excited for that to change. I hope that with more personalization, we will get more personality personalization. we will actually see different personalities emerge. Anyway, Cody Ploughker says, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, says half of the value I add as CEO is just applying urgency to situations. I like that. I think that's valuable.

You don't know what to do necessarily, but you just need to empower people to go figure it out, move fast. And Cody runs a massive beauty brand. Oh, really? Jones Road. Oh, no way. Also, switch to ramp recently. Let's go.

Congratulations. It's also a way that he added value as a CEO. Is he thinking about Switch to Adio? Customer relationship magic, because Adio is the AI native serum that builds scales and grows your company the next level. Tane says AI-influenced ARR is the new community-adjusted EBITDA because Adobe shares jumps 6% as AI-influenced ARR tops 5 billion. What does that mean?

I pay for some Adobe products at various points, Premier Pro. after effects. There are AI tools in there for rotoscoping, green screen. I think there's a subtitled a lot of this stuff. We kind of cobbled a lot of products. The challenge is when you have something. I assembled a PDF. Community adjusted EBITA. Yeah. That can be applied to any business, right? Any CEO can figure out how to apply that framework and just say, hey, you're not properly evaluating how awesome our customers are. Yeah. And so AI influence ARR could be applied to any business that uses chat GPT. Yeah, it feels like the name of the game or what was happening in like the Adobe CFO's head is like the market is rewarding AI revenue.

And so I need to shift my massive SaaS revenue into a bucket that's called AI revenue. And I can just do that by reclassifying existing revenue lines. every quarter and have kind of a new growth curve emerge for the AI-influenced ARR. But it's very unclear. Like if this is, if this is, you know, outcome-based pricing, token generation, image generation, like, Adobe has image credits. There's an article in Barron's. Adobe's stock gets downgraded, generative AI isn't all it's cracked up.

to be, which is painful because they're like, wait. We're actually just a SaaS company. So Morgan Stanley downgraded Adobe to equal weight from overnight, cutting his price target to 450 from 520 due to AI concerns. So Morgan Stanley's concerned about AI from a competitive standpoint.

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. So Morgan Stanley says it's still waiting for Adobe's push into Gen AI to bear fruit. they came out with an AI image generator like right after Dolly like two years ago and I have not seen a lot of adoption of it and they don't really have the distribution for it

it should weave its way into all the different Adobe products but it felt like they needed somebody like Scott Belski I agree. It had him for quite a while to be leading that effort and doing the deal making that even Alexander Wang is doing

with mid-jurney and things like that doesn't, you just don't, we don't talk about Adobe much at all on the show, right? We probably should. Yeah. You know, if they were properly playing this market, making big bets. Yeah. I'm surprised they have. One of their big pitches for their generative AI product was that they were saying, like,

we have a ton of stock images. We will only train on stock images. We're not going to train on any copyrighted material. And basically every other lab was like, no, we're definitely training on copyrighted material. We think this is fair use. we're going to fight this and we will pay the fines

and in the Anthropics case they're paying what billions of dollars in fines for a very specific thing but the specific fine that they're paying is not because they trained on copyrighted material

it's because they acquired the copyrighted material in not an above board way and so... According to Gemini, Adobe's only made one acquisition in the last 24 months

company called Refraise AI Indian based AI video startup you would think they'd be more acquisitive right now.

Totally. How many different Gen. AI creative tools there are and how many of them just aren't going to make it? It's only marginally better than generating images in nanobanana. Yeah, where were they during the windsurf bidding process? Like, where were they in these, like, you know, they're letting these things get away. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, that's the nature of being a big company.

Risk averse. They don't want some massive lawsuit showing up. I mean, like $6 billion. Yeah, but they could just be using the existing models. I think so too. Better, they could just add entirely new product lines, try to scale those, just through the existing distribution they have. Yeah, yeah.

I don't know, maybe captions. Captions has done some good stuff on video, editing, on mobile. I, they just, yeah, there's a bunch of questions on mobile. There's a bunch of questions. I'm sure they have a lot of enterprise stuff. To my, I haven't met somebody early in their career that's excited about AI. that's even talked about working with Adobe, right? And so if they don't have the talent,

they're not going to have that exciting a product. Yeah, Conor in the chat says their software acts like bloatware. Two thumbs down for Adobe from me. True. They just integrated nanobanana though. There we go. That's interesting. Smart.

Ground paper bag. Rune says, I just walk around the research floor at Open AI reminding everyone that they're propping up the world economy. It's good. Couldn't be more true. How many, you got Broadcom that's popping on Open AI partnerships, you got CoreWeave that's popping on Open AI partnerships, you got Oracle that's popping on Open AI partnerships. How many, we got a lot of, we got a lot of important companies that are riding with Open AI. SoftBank, right? SoftBank. SoftBank doesn't get enough credit. The stock's up. It is crazy that. Stocks up 118% year to date. When the last batch of hyperscalers were birthed, there wasn't this, there wasn't so many big companies that were like highly indexed or dependent on them, you know? Like, like Google's growth, people weren't like, oh, if Google doesn't work out, like, you know, Microsoft is screwed.

Like, or when meta, when Facebook first started, it wasn't like, oh, if Facebook, it becomes like, if Facebook stagnant. like the global economy will fail. It's like it was, it was like its own thing, often its own world, building its own data centers, and they were scaling, but it wasn't that crazy. Yeah, another, well, Roon's coming on. We've got three mentions of Rooms so far. Well, how about a mention of 8Sleep, 8Sleep.com?

Get a pod five, five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping, baby. I was away from home last night. Oh, yeah, you don't have a number. I got an 80, so win by default. Wow, not amazing. I'm getting back into it. I'm waking up.

It shouldn't be winning with an 80. I know, yeah, but win by default. Starbucks is closing hundreds of stores and laying off staff as the chain continues to struggle is this post. But the community note says Starbucks is closing about 1% of stores, which comes out under 2,000. They plan to remodel old stores and open more. So story is developing. Two cents, the social network for your net worth did a poll and said, what's your main caffeine source? who do you think one?

Who do you think the richest said? The most amount of value, I believe, went to energy drinks, but the most amount of votes went to coffee and tea. That's actually so bullish for energy drinks. Yeah. The read on this is that the rich people are using energy drinks and the poor people are using pills, caffeine pills. That makes sense.

I mean, the most economically efficient way to consume caffeine is through pills. right they're super cheap to buy caffeine pills um but uh no no caffeine had a strong showing as well so pick your poison energy drinks might be something this is a perfect transition we got to talk about ovi shiftman's out-of-home campaign if you want to run an out-of-home campaign go to ad quick dot combs out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising only ad quick combines technology out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. And as much as we love out-of-home campaigns,

as much as we love ads, probably don't do what friend.com It's an impressive move. The scale at which they have, they've seemingly bought up all the out-of-home inventory in L.A. and New York. I'll give you

the numbers. So Avi shared. He came on our show and said he's doing the largest out-of-home campaign in history. And I was like, that can't be true. That's so crazy. What about you know, Avengers? What about GTA 5? Like, there's got to be huge campaigns that have been run, but it seems like he might actually be running one of the biggest campaigns, if not the biggest campaign. He says, 11,000 car cards, I don't exactly know what a car card is,

1,000 platform posters, 130 urban panels, West 4th Street domination, 100% print all five boroughs. It's the largest NYC subway campaign ever happening now. We have seen it all over L.A. He said it was the largest billboard ad buying campaign of all time. And the ads... And this is a crazy... Don't say a lot about the product. It just says friend.com and it shows you the pendant. And the pendant is kind of white on white. Well, some of them do. Jumping off. So I'm seeing one from their subway campaign. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one thing is, Avi is pitching this as your new roommate. yes and the reason I think this is not uh there's the the the thing that's great about the

campaign is how controversial it is yeah there's a lot of people that are going to be taking pictures just saying look how dystopian this is and posting it that's exactly what's happening someone defaced it and said stop profiting off of loneliness but then some one person that saw that's going to buy it yep or it could be more right but ovi markets this as your new roommate is waiting It's funny to me because I've had a bunch of great roommates back in the day, but I like them even more now that I'm not sharing a space with them. Exactly. Living by yourself, your family is amazing. And I'm not personally in the market for a new roommate, but I'm also, I don't think, the target market for this because I hang out with you for 12 hours a day.

And if we're not hanging out, we're probably on the phone talking about technology and business. In the subway campaign, they say, it says, I'll never bail on our dinner plans, I'll binge the entire series with you, I'll never leave dirty dishes in the sink. So while he's saying it's your new roommate, he's implying it's better than your roommate because you're getting, I guess, the social benefits of a roommate without the dirty dishes in the sink and the bailing on dinner plans. Yeah. But people are not happy with this for one specific reason, which is that I think Avi is very backlogged on orders. He's gotten a lot of orders. He's gotten a lot of orders over the last year since he started selling it. And this is not the first time he's going viral and getting a lot of attention.

And he hasn't fulfilled a lot of them, it sounds like. So he was going back and forth with some people. people were saying bad you know a lot of marketing spend for a product that hasn't shipped orders from July of last year and so yeah if you're somebody who just hasn't received your device yet you're going to be kind of annoyed to be seeing this that they're trying to sell a lot more of these and you haven't gotten yours and I'm sure they're going order by order trying to get through Avi had said he'd sold 400 or he shipped out 400 in the last week which is a lot of hardware yeah um but the question but that's like how much are these 99 dollars or 200

how much is 1259 dollars so but the the main i guess the this feels like a ovi more or less said this on our show last time he came on basically said that 50k of i'm going to do a crazy out of home campaign so i can raise my next round that was i'm paraphrasing that that was what i that was my read on it because it it feels like the product is still super early yep the review from Wired was abysmal. And I'm sure that the, you know, you can make the argument that the people that reviewed it are not the target demo.

But I haven't, you know, the concern is that we're not seeing a ton of customer love out there. People are getting these. And so getting, telling the entire world about your product before it's ready, Billboard campaigns can work to get hype and early interest, but they're best when you have a product that is already loved and you're just able to get more eyeballs on it,

more attention, more customers. And so getting a whole new wave of customers that are then going to be waiting a long time for their device and then potentially people that are getting them currently or potentially let down, it just feels incredibly risky. The other thing I was looking into is, you know, the website right now, I wonder how it comes converts. It's possible that, you know, it's priced in a way that, uh, it is pretty affordable

in terms of like where devices play. Like people were shocked that the meta rayband displays are $7.99. And that's what, seven times as much money. Um, but it does feel like it just takes a while to tell you what the product is. And like, yeah, the main thing is this kind of parallax scrolling. It's a lot of like motion, a lot of business. physical, like, I got to do a lot of work. You can't hit order from, from, like, landing on the web page. Yeah. I wonder, if you go

in the way back machine, can you find what Apple's website was back at the first iPhone launch? Let me find that. I bet you there was a big buy button every, you want to buy a buy button every, no matter where you are on the website, you should always be able to hit buy. Yeah, I mean, that's like standard is like above the

fold. Don't let, don't make them scroll. Okay, when did the iPhone come out? 2007, right? 2007 let's see what the Apple website looked like in 2007 in October let's see it's loading it's loading I'm so excited

yeah well you know what a better piece of accessory might be something timeless instead of a pendant what you're thinking about what am I thinking about some hardware some hardware wrist I think of an Aquanaut as a friend really and in some ways it's super

intelligence. It is. It is. It can tell you the time. Can tell you the time. Can tell you. Better than a human. A chronograph can tell you. It can track time better than a human. It can. It's superhuman. Oh, yes. Of course. You're trying, if you're, if you're time and lap times on the track with a Daytona, that's going to be way more accurate than do it in your head. So head over to getbezzle.com. Your bezel concieres is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Oh, no, the Apple website is not loading from 2007. it's uh well the apple website today is definitely best practice for selling consumer yeah it's it's it's tough to make a comparison to today because everyone knows what an iPhone is and they're on number

17 and so they can just say it's an iPhone it's the best item it's a new iPhone 17 pro you can hit the buy or you can hit learn more if you hit learn more you land on a new page with a cool video that says buy it's just bye bye bye bye so anyways we'll see how this plays out the challenge is you know, having this visceral of a reaction even from tech insiders. Yeah. Wow. There definitely is something to, like, kicking the bear and rage baiting a little bit and getting a bunch of somewhat negative attention, but then people will, there will be a

small percentage of people that are like, I'm in, I want to try it, and that works. But it feels like at some point you have to flip into just, um, like normal territory and kind of just speak to the product benefits. In January 31st of 2008, the Apple homepage, do you know what was above the fold? It was right there? What was it? Wasn't the iPhone. It was the world's thinnest notebook, the MacBook Air.

You have to click somewhere else to find the iPhone January update. Let me see if they have some other page. They're just like, yeah, we'll put that iPhone in the back, you know. Yeah, we got some iPhones in the back. I mean, the MacBook Air was beautiful computer and certainly. then they had the iMac the iPhone is really not on display here like it's it's store and the header is store Mac iPod and iTunes and then iPhone iPhone is the fourth item in the bar it's like the fourth most important if you rank them by by importance but I'm trying to go to apple.com

slash iPhone in the internet archive to see how they position it and it's extremely wonky You say features, phone, iPod, internet, the fourth feature. Can you guess the fourth feature of why you would want to buy the iPhone? Alarm clock? Nope. This is even better. You're going to love this. You're going to love this.

You're going to love this. Stock. Love this. No. So you got the phone. You got the iPod. You got the internet. The fourth feature for why you would want to buy the iPhone.

High technology. I'm not kidding you, dude. High technology. Isn't that remarkable? What does that even mean? Let's find. out. I got to click on high technology. It just has an image of like a laser or something like that. I don't know what it is. And then they show some maps and stuff. But what is this high technology that they're

They need to bring that back. Oh, high technology. It means that it has multi-touch. It has wireless. It has an accelerometer and a proximity sensor. That is high tech. Multi-touch was high technology at the time. That feature set allowed you to drink beer, an animated beer. The accelerometer was the reason that could do that. That's right. That actually was high technology at the time. That was high tech. We don't know how to make high technology. We don't. We don't. We got, we were talking to the meta team and we were like, make the beer app. What's the beer app? And it's such a jogo, the beer app. But the beer app is a, is a moment that means that you've arrived and you have the crazy developers and people are making memes and they're using your

technology in ways that you never could have imagined. If you're not getting memes, you're Yes, exactly. And Studio Ghibli was that. And we've yet to see that in the vibes app. Well, you know, what will the friend version of that be? What will be the, you know, becoming a platform? What will be the product or the use case that isn't imagined by the designer that winds up driving value, at least for fun, you know. Like going to wander. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views. Hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 24-7 concier service. It's a vacation home, but better. Do you see the Fermi IPO? QCAP says the upcoming Fermi IPO will be the most 2025 IPO. All the red flags are there. Literally every single one, there's no revenue. It has a $13 billion valuation. It's powering AI by 2038.

There's a nuclear component. The nuclear component will be called the Donald J. Trump generating plant, which only could mean one thing. Buy. I think this is going out on the NASDAQ. Texas-sized IPO. Requirements than NICC. It's a wild, wild time out there.

Be safe. Do your own research. And this, of course, is not financial advice. We might be. Founded only nine months ago. Nine months to get to $13 billion. Is that a new record? Nine months to get to $13 billion?

Who's done that? He did it in. Maybe, yeah. He did it in minutes. In the coin world. In minutes, yeah. It went out and minutes later was here. So, Fermi, stuff.

stock listing date nears for AI data center and power company backed by Rick Perry. Founded only nine months ago, the company plans to build a Texas-based hypergrid. Let's give it up for hypergrid. I like that. And become a provider of data and power centers. They got a cool render here. Superintelligence is out. We're talking about hyper intelligence now. As the rise of AI continues, companies operating in this space, relying on the technology, are finding that they have two inextricable needs. Data centers that can run and process the AI and access to ample energy to power those vast data centers. One new company, Fermi, America. Props for putting America in the name of the company. Ames to offer solutions for both these needs. And this week, Fermi now it's plans for an upcoming initial public offering and dual stock listings. They're going to be listing in the UK as well.

Fermi America's very young company. It was only founded this year just nine months ago in January 2025. The company is so new that its website is still a relatively bare bones affair. I pull it up. It just says, yeah, it looks like a stock website from, looks like they got a template of a website. It just, and doesn't even look like they replaced all the stock imagery. They just said,

Hmm. They should have vibe-coded something from scratch. Saying. Mixed bag with naming your company after. Enrico Fermi? Just after a famous scientist who's not involved, obviously Tesla's done very well. Zach Weinberg has Curie bio after, Mary Curry, right? Nicola

did not do well, of course. Yeah, so Fermi... Enrico Fermi was an Italian and naturalized American physicist, renowned for being the creator of the world's first artificial nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile 1 and a member of the Manhattan Project. He has been called the architect of the nuclear age

and the architect of the atomic bomb. So anyways, let me try to get a little bit more color here. Given the youth of the company, it's no surprise that the majority of Americans and most likely never heard of it, but they have heard of its co-founder

Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, who ran as a GOP contender for president in 2012. Oh, he's behind this? I was trying to think like, Rick Perry, I know that name, but it's not in the tech context.

After unsuccessful presidential bids, Perry was appointed as the 14th United States Secretary of Energy during President Trump's first term in office. In addition to Perry, Fermi America was also co-founded by Toby Newbauer, a former co-managing partner of quantum energy. Fermi America intends to be a provider of data and power centers that other companies can use to host their AI needs. But I say, quote, intends to because Fermi America doesn't actually provide any services yet. Heck, it doesn't even have any infrastructure yet to provide its services.

What Fermi America does have is a lease. let's give it up for having a lease a lease for 5,200 acres of land owned by Texas Tech University which is where Fermi plans to build a hypergrid in an undertaking dubbed Project Matador

The naming is fantastic What is Project Matador? Project Matador is the name given to Fermi America's hypergrid project. This hypergrid will be combined data and power center that other companies will pay to lease space.

on to run. So anyways, they want to deliver up to 11 gigawatts of low carbon, hyper redundant, and on-demand power directly for the world's most compute-intensive businesses. Yeah. I mean, there's stuff all over the place. This is the nature of bull markets. You get all kinds of crazy outcomes. Shanu Matthew is sharing a quote from David Einhorn, the hedge fund manager. He's warning that AI's trillion-dollar infrastructure spending could destroy vast capital despite tech being transformative. He questions whether all the extreme spending by hyperscalators will deliver

returns, saying there's a reasonable chance of tremendous capital destruction, which we hate. I hate the idea of capital being destroyed. Wean, wean, wamp. But there's still a lot to look forward to. There's still great products coming out every single day.

Like five. I've joined them. Vibes, I think, I mean, we discussed it a lot. We're going to continue. discussing it with our next guest, Rune. But I think that there is a way to have fun on vibes. I'm already having fun with my promoted post, my SpawnCon.

I came in there, hot for a rap ad. TBPN ad. I say if you bring your own creativity, you can probably have fun on there. But be careful because you might just wind up in Infinite Just World. Anyway, we have our next guest, Rune, the anonymous poster, the world famous Rune, the TBPN Ultradome. There he is. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Rune?

Hello, hello. I'm good. How are you? We're fantastic. At long last. What, I mean, it's a-printing your posts. We've been printing your posts for months ago. So thank you for everything that you do for the timeline, always providing insight and levity.

You guys mentioned me four times this week, and I was like, I got to come on, just a wrong number. off the week you know it's time it's uh close it up yeah jordan john yeah and thank you thank you for walking around the and and you know reminding the researchers that you guys are you know holding up the global economy yes it really is important work what they're doing and also you to just make them remember i mean i know you guys comment on this like all the time but like most of the growth in the equity markets is just AI you know for the past like three years. It's like really nothing else. So, you know, uh, you got to not make mistakes. Got to keep pumping out great models. Yeah. Please don't make mistakes. That's all, that's all we, that's all we're,

but yeah, I mean, we, we talked about it earlier today. The number of companies that are now, you know, uh, barnacles on the whale of open AI is, uh, the entire global economy is sort of a bar. Yeah, but you can even get, you can even get more specific. Yes. And, um, you know, the, the, the oracles, the core weaves, you know, you can make a really long list. Yeah. How are you feeling generally? The timeline was extremely split this morning and yesterday. A lot of incredibly great vibes around chat GPT pulse, less great vibes around the vibes app. Are you happy with the direction that the productization of AI is going? Are you happy with the the rollout and the actual implementation of these models so far how have you

been processing the way these models are making their way into every everyday lives yeah I don't know like okay the chat bot medium this one thing it's I think the pulse is like a fine and good idea it makes a lot of sense yeah vibes I don't know but like the the thing I am like manic about is code And you've probably seen me tweeting about it like three times a day but like more than that more than that Yeah like codex and I guess like Claude code are like genuinely amazing Like I don't want to like you know glaze the company's products too much but like it's like I don't understand how I did software engineering before this I have like 20 terminal agents open and like writing like five different things at once

And I have an idea and I just like open up a new terminal and I just like get it working on it. And it's like a completely different way of life than anything I was doing before, which is like you like linearly slog through one script. And I'm like there's like three or four bugs and like I don't know. Like it's clear to me that this alone is like completely upends the software industry. And you know, like we're talking about massive data center capax across the industry and like, what is it going to be spent on? And like, even the inference alone for this kind of thing, it's like, first of all, like super expensive

and then like super in demand, I think, once it like really percolates through the economy. So yeah, I mean, like that's the thing that is, fueling my mania these days. Like it reignited my, you know, fuel, AGI fire. Well, yeah, so you said completely upending the software industry, what does that actually look like in your mind?

Because one thing is if developers are getting, if the average developer gets higher output. Developers are going to be fine. A lot of other people have been like, you know, 90% of software engineering will be automated, but maybe we do 10 times as much. So there's the same amount. Like, what's the long-term view for you?

Yeah, I, I like really don't know about the jobs or whatever. It's like extremely non-linear and hard to predict. I feel like there's so much, you know like i see the product managers at my company they're like vibe coding useful apps all the time and like people who are not even engineers are becoming like programmers because of these things and i'm sure that's a case for like the most junior level engineers who are like bright are like now they're like way better than they were before i remember my first year of programming And I was like running to my mentor for like, you know, like how do I run this whatever basic thing.

And like they just don't have to do that anymore. Like they have to, they can avoid all that embarrassment. They have this like amazing agent or like the chatGBT itself or whatever it is. To me, it would seem like the productivity of an entry level engineer is like just way higher than it would have been like five years ago. I can't, you know, speak to jobs impact. like the two years or three years or ten years or what about in terms of the consumer impact i feel like you still hear people complaining about like uh my united airlines app is not as great as it could be and it feels like in a world where software engineering gets way easier more reliable higher

leverage like we should start seeing higher quality software diffuse through the everyday lives of people that interface with technology is it feel like that's happening going to start happening or is there something sort of intractable about an airline booking app that just can't be solved yeah i mean like first of all i don't trust people's vibes on this i don't actually think they're paying good attention out of the united app looked like three years ago or whatever sure sure i i'm sure it's actually a lot better yeah like i've seen the in-flight displays on united and they're like like what is this it's like space age it's way better than it was before um and okay I don't know that Knight of engineers are using any of these tools.

Maybe they're not. Maybe their company doesn't allow them. Maybe they use like some third party source or I have no idea. But, you know, that's what I was saying. Of course, these tools, I have no idea what time it takes for them to percolate through an economy or like when people in like the, you know, like the the non-tech Fortune 500s are using them or anything like that. But from everyone I've spoken to that works at like, say, like GM or Ford or something, they're like, what's Codex? You know, it's not there yet. Of course not.

I hope it will be. But the fact that it even exists is just like exhilarating to me. Do you think Codex has the potential to be a hit consumer product and get, you know, end up eating into the market share of some of these. new vibe, vibe coding, you know, companies? Of course, but also I think they're very excited, like even just the cursor people, because I don't know, like there's like a competition between Open AI and like Anthropic and that's probably good for them. I don't know.

It's hard for me to say, but I'm pretty sure that Curse is killing it and I'm very excited. Yeah. How are you using the various products? It seems like you're using codex all the time. Are you using codex on mobile as well? Are you in sort of like a, like, you know, wake up in the morning and you have an idea, or like a shower thought. And I find myself doing this with just GPT5 Pro queries or deep research queries.

I have some idea. I fire it off and I just wait. But I'm not writing a ton of software. Are you having a similar experience that I'm having with just, knowledge retrieval in code generation where you might be firing it off like when you're in the bathroom and getting dinner with someone and you just have a second you just fire something off no I'm just like not a hardcore enough engineer to doing stuff like that but I I definitely use like five pro or whatever all the time just to whatever random idea comes to my head

I wake up on like researching some I don't know some statistic or like setting off some query like what percent of the economy is like software engineers. Yeah, how much you think you personally cost Open AI monthly? Like how much are you personally? A lot. A lot. I can't say, but a lot. What about other other use cases? I mean, we saw that a lot of people are using these models for like life coaches and just people chatting. And I've never really gone down that path. I don't know. Maybe I'm just busy or I talked to Jordy all day long so I don't have a lot of room for that I I hit knowledge retrieval constantly like the GDP of some country yeah give me the full history of it

I did a deep research report yesterday on the capital of California thought for 59 seconds yeah it ran a hundred searches I hit that stuff all the time but I but I haven't gotten in any sort of flow of asking for uh interpersonal advice life coaching therapy any of that stuff have you had any luck or is that just like a is that a skill issue or just personality or a certain type of person that uses things that way like do how do you think about that use case um i've definitely used it in like a tough corner like what decision do i make and i like have it discuss with me yeah uh i don't know i'm probably not a typical user because i like read what it says and i'm like oh this this one seems kind of like bullshit and this is like a great point and

I like weigh it and ignore it and whatever but yeah I think actually new sonnet was an amazing model for this and this was what they called Claude 3.5 Sonnet New and I think that kind of invented this genre of like I ask Claude for everything in my life and I think like the latest GPT models can also do this but like yes there was like memes going around about the the Claude boys back then who just like yeah like literally everything they do they'd run it through Claude yeah it's uh it's a bit weird for sure like are you you know are you being populated by an AI it's it's a bit loss of control vibes it's uh I feel like my interactions with AI are getting less back and forth over the last two years I used to chat back and forth and ask a lot of follow up questions and I feel like now if I just talk to GPT5 Pro on voice mode for a minute and give it a bunch of context, it's going to come back with a very thorough answer that I might have one or two follow-ups on, but I'm not really,

I certainly don't have this concept of like, there's one chat that's like fine-tuned at this point on this particular that I, oh yeah, my economics chat, I go over here when I'm asking an economics question, like everything is done at just like a new chat router level, basically. Is that kind of mirror your experience? Yeah, I do think the open-hand models are built for that. It's like a single turn, think really hard, get you the right answer type of thing. What about like the flavor of the responses? Like with the GPT3 API, it felt like if you prompted it with like the green text, you'd get a green text back.

And it felt like there was a lot of, a lot of variation in the style of writing. And now we're seeing, maybe it's just the way people are prompting, but it feels like there's a little bit of like a consolidation in the, in the textual style, the stylistic flourishes, the, it's not that, it's this, and the MDash and all of that. Like, it feels very much like if I opened up your app and asked you and asked the same question, I would get the same stylistic flourish. And I'm wondering if that's something that you think will continue or maybe that's just a temporary moment of time and we'll wind up in the future where someone's talking to that the vibes of Claude 3.5. Maybe in a different completely, in a completely different model, but they're, they have those vibes over there. And then someone has 4-0 vibes over here, but they're not talking to literal 40 or literal 3.5, but they've kind of landed in a local minima of this is the tone that they like for all of their interactions. Um, yeah, these are great questions. I mean, like the, the GP3 model to me was like my first field AGI kind of like hair raising moment. I remember playing with it and just being like, oh, this thing's intelligent in ways that are like, yeah, just like non-trivial, creative, etc. But people are also like too rosy about like the base models.

they just don't they're like extremely uh random they like they don't even have a concept of uh you know like we talk about hallucination but what the base model is doing is only hallucination like it's not uh you know maybe one out of 20 completions will have a coherent uh like front to back like sensical text and there are people who can do like magical things with it but there is reason there was no like GPD3 moment and there was like a chat GPT moment where like the like it took off among consumers and same with like Claude and and whatever right but um there is like at all these companies there's this um what do you call like a path dependence of post training so like the models sample and you collect comparisons between model samples and

And you're like, I shouldn't talk too much about post-training, but like the point being, like you are very reliant on the previous generational models to train your next model. And so there's like some style burn in that goes on. Sure. And like the late Claude's resemble early claw and like the late grocs resemble early grok and so on. And yeah, and like they all have some similarities probably because of like, Well, I mean, they're all training on the same giant data set of the internet, more or less. And I also have, like, these common data sets.

I guess I just wonder if, like, there's, there's demand from people for more variation in vibes. I was, uh, I was asking Mark Chen about this where, um, like, I was like, everyone was saying GPT 4.5 had a big model smell, better, like, flavor to it, better writer. But deep research was the one that could get you all the results. And I was like, so is the best practice for me now that I should, like, run a deep research report and then take that to GPT 4.5 and say, hey, rewrite this better? And I'm wondering if there's some world where there's just demand for, like, I like a lowercase person to chat with. I like really punchy. I mean, I guess you can kind of put that in the prompts, but I'm wondering if that's like at some point going to be an emergent property. I think you should try the fad thinking model if you have some use kids like that.

Okay, yeah. It's the same thing, basically. Does that work for you? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's honestly like I'm fine with the, I like the, I like the flavor and the vibe that it comes back to me with. It's just, it is impersonal. But that's exactly what I'm, but that's exactly what I'm hitting it with. And I want that.

I want it to be an assistant. I want it to be a helpful assistant. I want it to be like a textbook. I want bullet points. I want M-dashes. I want clear analogies. And so I'm very satisfied. So I'm wondering,

I mean, maybe it's just a revealed preference versus stated preference, but it seems like there's a lot of stated preference out there that people are sick of M-dashes and if it's not this, it's that. And it's certainly like a tell

that someone used in LLM. But I was just thinking more about like how, if there really are people out there with the revealed preference, with the true preference for something and will the models eventually be able to be many things to many people, show a different face to every single different. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the end stage is like extremely personalized models that speak to you, guess, even before you even tell them what it is that you want the model to sound like.

and i see no real reason that's like not possible yeah just a matter of doing it and the what else do you think um do you think memory will start to be like feel like more of a moat as uh products like pulse get more popular it feels like this is the first time that uh you know i i don't feel like can i ask you guys a question please When I saw the first episode, it was called the Technology Brothers Podcast Network. What happened? It was just Technology Brothers. Okay.

And then we had a big problem, which was that our community, teapot, and the tech community broadly honored that we were calling it Technology Brothers. but when journalists would write about technology brothers, they would introduce us as John and Jordy, the tech bros, and they would shorten it, which was massively disrespectful. And once we realized we were doing our life's work, we did not want to spend the next 30 years everywhere we go being introduced as the tech bros. Yeah, that's disrespectful.

If they had called you Jordy and John, the technology brothers, We would have kept riding with it, but it was a big problem. It's the battle we lost. Okay. I believe you credited me with that one. You pull up a tweet on the first episode. Yeah, you were one of the first people to truly, you know, expand tech bros into technology brothers. So thank you for popularizing the term.

What do you think? I accept your change, yeah. What do you think of what thinking machines has been putting out lately? I think it's really cool that, you know, like new labs, they're incentivized to speak very openly about their research because, you know, like, it's a great recruiting mechanism. You're like, there's some cool research you're doing and like, let me come join and like, I don't know, maybe, I guess Facebook was pursuing this strategy a while back or meta or whatever they're called now. they open source everything they write a lot of public papers and it was a big draw for people um i haven't read the latest paper but i read the last one it was something i had been wondering about for a while and like was a common question in the industry about uh determinism and non-determinism

and so on yeah it's it's good stuff it's good stuff i don't know like it's great stuff I don't know specifically what they're working on. I've heard rumors, but I won't. I can't. I shouldn't talk about it. What about hardware form factors? What's, you know, speak generally. You don't have to talk about what you guys are working on internally, but what's

exciting to you in hardware broadly? Do we need new dedicated devices or is the phone good enough? I don't know. I don't have the answers to that. I, like, genuinely don't think about the hardware's died very much. well that's that says something in itself yeah i mean i'm pretty happy with my uh chat gbt on my phone but what was on your pulse today i don't think i checked mine was check right now mine was shockingly interesting pulse is a window into the mind it was it was it was extremely interesting

talking about bottlenecks and compute revolutions and retired coal plants power AI campuses and it even had one I was searching for different options for bonded cellular network so if you want to bond a Verizon and AT&T like SIM card together to get like a really powerful Wi-Fi hotspot on the go for live streaming obviously and it had a whole deep dive on that and it's like yeah I'd search for that but I would love to have that resurface to me in a different format right and so I was I was very pleased with the results And it also felt like deeply, maybe it's just like the way I've been using the product, but it felt deeply anti-brain-wrot.

It felt like, oh, these are, these are articles. I don't even know what you would call them, but summaries that certainly push me to go deeper into something that's actually hard work, learning, as opposed to something that's more like candy and helping me just kind of tune out things. I enjoyed that. Look, here's, like mine is just exactly what you expect. it's like tracking AI's impact on power markets. It's like Chinese infrastructure spend.

It's all this kind of stuff. Yeah. It's very predictable. It's very predictable. Now I want to know. Share that article with me. I want to know about Chinese infrastructure investments and how they're tracking with the use.

Well, maybe that's a feature. Rune shared as Pulse today. I think so. Check it out. I mean, you can already share the link. So yeah, you'll need to be able to share it in the app. anyway what uh what what else is uh is keeping you up these days uh you were you were talking you kind of laid out we reviewed the post on the show um um just talking more broadly about

the nature of process power and dan wang's book um have you uh where do you sit on the uh the general characterization of the lawyerly society in america does it feel like we are becoming more lawyerly or less lawyerly. Well, some prominent engineers founders and AI have certainly gotten litigious recently so maybe America could do both.

At the same time, many engineers are crossing over into the government. Yeah. I guess what is interesting to me is like the extreme depth of the capital markets in the U.S. where like

one company can raise hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure spend and you know together the industry is spending I have no idea like you guys probably know the numbers better than I do um and that's like that's very interesting so where the like you know if it's like such a lawyerly society why are we able to do this like why are we able to spend so much um and you know of course it's true like if you look at like the the west side of San Francisco, it's like it should not be this like rows and rows of single family houses. It's like quite a waste. It's quite a shame. But there's many things like that that people have talked about at infinitum. But in general, it's like, okay, like Elon Musk showed up and he revolutionized two industries, right? Like the space travel and the electric cars. And I'm sure he fought with regulators. and like there's a bunch of lawsuits and whatever but like you know his like his I guess his will to power or whatever made it work and so I am always a bit skeptical when people say like you know the US is impossible to innovate in because of regulations or I it seems like it's it's getting done people do it um yeah you know maybe like the the highest level of government is more lawyerly in the US than China but I don't um There's also benefits to that, which Dan Wang talks about, you know, like there's no, I don't want to get into it, but I think you guys know the upsides of the great rule of law and whatnot.

Yeah, I do wonder if, yeah, I mean, that's kind of the odd counter take is that maybe the depth of the financial markets is actually an outgrowth of the lawyerly society. when you have a bunch of lawyers who can create robust contracts where somebody feels comfortable parting with $10 billion, $100 billion. Is that a function of engineering? It might be a function of financial engineering in some ways, but it is also a function of strong legal contracts and the work of lawyers to be creative, but also fair in a way that instills confidence in the capital markets, such that the company is willing to to deploy a hundred billion dollars and know that there's a at least there's an understanding of

the pathway to the return on investment and that it's it's less there's less uncertainty well on the other hand you have ticot allegedly selling for 14 billion sure which i'm sure is less than what was spent to grow ticot in the u.s i don't know but that's that's more government intervention worth a couple more zeros than that. Just a couple. It does seem... Do you think the Gartner hype cycle is being over-applied in the context of AI? Do you think we could just have a straight line acceleration and there's no trough or are you trough-pilled?

I just don't get this thing where people like overlay graphs and they like do this like high-level pattern match. when it's like, okay, like, let's look at the basics, which is, to me, the basics are code-ups, which is like, like, literally as of two months ago, this was not a thing, and now it's a thing. And it's like, to me, a mind-blown product. Just, I can't, I can't stress this enough. And, okay, like, that alone is going to create just enormous revenue streams for both OpenAI and Anthropic, I assume, and Cursor. So, like, I don't know, I just don't, it doesn't seem worth the, yeah, of course, like, yes, will it create, the whole world is still over leveraged. Trillion, you know, so, so will it create a trillion dollar revenue stream? Um, I don't think it needs to create a trillion dollar revenue stream to, to keep up with the, uh, the data center plans. But that's, um, you know, it's not for me to say. You should. you should get on the CFO or something of one of these companies and ask them. What about, give us your read on the state of open source today. Open AIs, open source models were demanded.

They were released. And then you don't hear, you know, it haven't been a lot of noise surrounding them, but certainly a lot of a lot of noise coming around some of the Chinese open source. models but what's what's your kind of current framework open source models yeah yeah um well there's two takes on that one is that people demanded it but they didn't actually want it the other is that maybe the OSS model just wasn't meeting the market needs or like it was not good at whatever it is the market I want it um I don't know it maybe it's a stated I mean I have no idea it's a stated versus revealed preference at least for

a lot of the people that were most loudly demanding open source. I will say some of these, the Chinese, the Chinese Kimi K2 model is like really quite excellent to me. It's a great writer. Yeah, it's like the model I compare against most internally. It's kind of cool. I mean, people have, people have been demanding open source versions of technology for a long time. There were open source social network. and open source. There's an open source version of Shopify. And yet Shopify accrued all the value.

And no one's forking that particular Ruby on Rails project just to get their e-commerce store up and running. I think there's like two problems with the kind of hype around open source. One is like, okay, you've open source some model, but it's also clear that that doesn't immediately make it accessible to like a billion people. Totally. like obviously the chat gpti product and you know like whatever else grok is hugely downloaded jemini whatever but like the um it's like by far the easiest way for someone to access

AI and for free they're like doing it for free um so like on that angle it's not really all that decentralized just because the model weights are like flying around um second of all if everything was always open source you guys know as well as i do that it's like whole industry would never support this kind of capex yeah um and this r&d spend and whatever and so like there's just no there's no way like that that's just the only way to do things and like that's i you know just just normal capitalism you know yeah a question from the chat did you read one piece no i have not i have a bunch of friends who swear by it but i've never never gone into that are there any other are there any other uh cultural influences that you pull from favorite movies books comic books oh yeah of course

all the time i mean top of the stack my favorite show ever is probably this anime called the evangelian oh yeah it's like a 90s tv show it's like kind of grim but like is this a staple of like the Mecca fighter genre. Yeah. Are there metaphors from, is it Evangelian or Evangelian? Is there a metaphor? Real heads called Evangeline, yeah. Evangelian, yeah.

Because that's like the way the Japanese sit. Yeah. Is there, are there themes in that story that people pull from and apply to like the modern world and they go, oh, this is just like Evangelian, Evangelian? um i certainly think there's like a dense religious metaphor in there for like i don't know um it's like a classic coving of age tale where um bill dungerman exactly that's what they call it and this this kid he's kind of like a depressive anti like he's got none of the good qualities of protagonists he's like constantly crashing out and he's like

There's a bunch of girls who are into him, and he's, like, not capable of talking to any of them. And he, you know, but he's, like, magically, like, the best guy in the world with piloting these robots to beat these aliens. And, like, humanity keeps calling on him, even though he's, like, being mentally destroyed to combat the aliens. And it's like the story about, like, yeah. If you can crash out and not talk to women, but if you're good at, if you're good at driving the robot, History will remember your name for sure. Totally. What's the best way that started with Evangelion?

Start with episode one. Just watch it. It's not like, oh, you've got to read the books first, that type of thing. You know how people will say that about like, don't watch the movie until you see the read the books or whatever. If you want to get really pedantic anal about it, there's like a different subtitles that came out in the 90s that are better than the Netflix subtitles. It's not really that important. you know like it's a pretty big barrier entry there's a 26 episodes in a movie

it's pretty straightforward it's not like some crazy watch order and whatnot okay maybe I'll check it out yeah what's a bunch of media I love what's a current state of the talent wars from your view did we peak over the summer

or is it still just as intense that's your read on it I mean, it seems like, okay, if a researcher is a manager of compute and the compute numbers are growing and then, like, the effectiveness of a researcher is more and more important than, I don't know, like, that line is trending up into the right as far as I can tell. But do you guys agree? Does that logic make sense? I don't know, 100%. I think the logic makes sense. I just think it's interesting that we're seeing essentially the same thing play out that we've seen for, I don't know, for generations in entrepreneurship where a founder can marshal capital and have leverage and incredible economic upside.

Now we're seeing founder level wealth and financial outcomes applied to employees, which is just a different thing. It used to be in order to get the big, big numbers. You had to go build something externally, and then the board would justify paying you a bunch to bring it in-house. And now it feels like companies are more, they've actually just cracked the code on, hey, come work here, build this thing that's going to deliver a bunch of value, and we will pay you like you're a founder that was out in the wilderness and we acquired in. And it feels like it's, in some ways, it always should have been this way. It feels like an aqua hire to me, like just some sort of distributing. aquire. Totally. Yeah. That was my

framing for it. You just have to look at as an unauthorized distributed aquire. Yeah. It's like, okay. And like, how much did Zuck pay in total for all these researchers over the course of four years? Is it like that enormous? Is it like, I don't know, like

compared to the value they're going to generate for him. Certainly not relative to the market cap. And especially if you just think about like even if you take the boring view of like AI is just another business line. that they need to be in. You know, it's like, oh, they're spinning up a new division. It's like, well, if the new division drives 10% of their revenue or 20%,

it becomes a significant business line, investing 1% of your market cap makes a ton of sense to actually just like be in there. There's way more complicated dynamics there, but even if you just saw it as like, we need an infrastructure team, we need a database team, we need a front end team. It's like you need an AI team, and you're going to have leverage in this case. what do you think about this rich rich sutton take that's going out just dropped on the dorcas show lLMs are maybe not bitter lesson-pilled this idea that we need you know an entirely new format people have been saying this for a very very long time deep learning is going to hit a wall then

we come out with something new what are your thoughts on the father of reinforcement learning potentially not thinking that LLMs are bitter lesson-pilled on I think this is a common sentiment, like deep mind, that they were always like, they kind of held language models with a bit of like, this is icky, this is not pure, because we're not starting from scratch. We're learning from the human internet, and that's like, that's not, you know, it's not pure in some sense. And like, say, Alpha Zero, which is learned from nothing, like, you just self-play yourself to superhuman performance. So, yeah, like, maybe it's not completely the most bitter lesson-pilled paradigm in the world. But, like, I don't know. That doesn't mean to me that it won't, like, reach extremely useful levels of intelligence.

And you should ask I think about that. It already is really useful. Like, yeah, it's like the question of, like, will we get value out of this? Is, like, answered by DAUs in just a million anecdotes of people that use the products, in my opinion. Jordy, anything else? I got a lot more stuff, but we're over time. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Glad we finally made this happen. Thank you for posting the posts that make this show possible. We truly enjoy covering everyone. John, you want to hit the gong for Roon? Yes. Congratulations. Can't get out without a gong honor. What an honor.

250,000 followers on X, I believe, is roughly the number or something like that. It's definitely gong worthy. There we go. Hit it. Good stuff, Rune. Thank you for your thoughts and your posts, and have a wonderful Friday. Have a great weekend. Thanks for having me on.

We'll talk about you soon. Good stuff. Let's go back to the timeline, run through some posts before we get out of here. I confirm me already. Everyone in this company was given a whoop and is required to share their data. This seems like something we would do with eight sleep. Is this? I used to this to assign more work to those who are sleeping a little too well.

You are a healthy military-aged man. Why do you need eight hours of sleep? Because you need a high sleep score. But this is a lot of fun. I believe Omar Wasim, I feel like I've met him. Anyway, where should we go? There's some big posts. What is up with this bagel?

The pop-up bagel shop? Do you know about this, Jordi? Chris... I've never been a bagel? Turner says, I'm calling it right now. This will be the next billion-dollar franchise brand. The next Crumble. They're copy-pasting the Crumble playbook, a playbook I'm not familiar with.

300-plus franchises sold in the first month. 2 to 5 million gross per store with 25% net margins after fees, lines out the door. So I'm not familiar with the Crumble story. This feels like some... Crumble cookies is probably the breakout franchise of the last... five, ten, uh, I think more like five years. So they sell cookies all over the country now, franchise model. So I think they maybe operated their first few stores. They now are like very focused on the franchise model. They have, uh, cookies that are probably like the least healthy

thing that you could put into body. Oh, they're like really over the top, right? It's like a whole cake in a cookie basically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So super high calorie. I'm sure they're super tasty. all over the country now. But it sounds like a unique business model where they've cracked the code on scaling retail through franchisees very soon. You always hear about McDonald's and Burger King franchisees. Yeah, franchise, if you can have a durable hit

consumer franchise, it's one of the most amazing businesses in the world because you get paid some percentage off the top. So it's not a percentage of profits. You're getting a percentage of gross revenue in exchange for giving somebody access to your brand and like menu and supply chain. It is value.

And they sort of have an entrepreneurial outcome as well. Like there's plenty of towns where like there's a guy who owns a couple McDonald's and does very well and has a boat. And then there's also Patrick O'Shaughnessy profile the company. And there's some street advisor company that does roll ups of them and has done very well as well. Yeah, yeah. Tons of examples of people making a lot of money in franchises. You can start with, you know, working in one.

Then you can transition to being an operator. Then you can add more. Yeah. You can buy more, you can roll them up, and they trade it pretty, you know, if you have a bunch of Burger Kings, they trade at a great multiple because it's a durable brand. And so, yeah, I think 300 franchises is crazy because they're getting a ton of upfront revenue and then they'll get a percentage of the gross over time. Yeah. Look at this post from Jeremy Gaffon. He says, staying below a $10 million deal size.

for 25 years is remarkable. The real lesson from Mark Leonard, the founder of Constellation, to me is of maniacal discipline. And so the value of acquisitions was, wait, how is this? Average price per acquisition was, wow, down at $5 million for 2007 all the way through 2012 and then still really low for a decade and paid a little bit more in 2013 and is now starting to pay more, but really just, I mean, people think about these, like, private equity software roll-ups, you know, the software company sells for, you know, we see the marks. People raise $20 million.

They sell for $100 million, $200 million. That's the one that gets the attention. But there are so many companies that are selling for $10 million, $5 million, $20 million, and Constellations picking them all up and has built like a fantastic business integrating all these. You have to have some serious infrastructure to do something with a $5 million business. that you just acquired, but certainly good coverage. Bucco Capital has a great post here from Intel.

Apparently, it was up another 19% yesterday. Wow, it's up another 20% in the last five days. I mean, do you know the story here? So Intel reached out to Apple and TSM for investment as well. And so, Nvidia wound up just kind of getting in early. Asinvidia was like, we're going to do something. USA got in early. The USA got in extremely early.

Why don't you read through that? Brenner. Read through that. I'll be right back. Yeah, sure. So the news is that Apple and TSM might be playing ball, might be, open up the checkbooks for Intel. Efforts to gain tech backers accelerate in the wake of U.S. 10% stake in chipmaker. Of course, Donald Trump and the U.S. government announced a 10% stake in Intel. Intel chief executive Lip Bhutan has been hustling to secure investments and customer commitments needed for the chipmaker's comeback among the companies Intel has approached about investments or manufacturing partnerships are Apple and TSM, Taiwan Semiconductor manufacturing. Those efforts were already underway before President Trump showed an interest in the company last month, but has since gone into overdrive since the U.S. took a 10% stake in it, according to people familiar. The Trump administration has been using its influence to help revive Intel's sagging fortunes, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik and others in the administration have for months been urging tech companies to work more

closely with Intel, which was for the long, was for long the world's largest semiconductor firm before it losing its lead to TSM. SoftBank made a $2 billion investment in Intel, and Vidae made a $5 billion investment in Intel and is now, and that it also includes a provision for Intel to design new hardware to integrate with Nvidia's chips. Masayoshi Sohn and Jensen Wong have both been demonstrative in their support of the administration's technology agenda, which includes building up domestic semiconductor manufacturing capacity and supercharging the construction of data centers needed by the artificial intelligence industry.

Bloomberg earlier reported on Intel's overtures to Apple. Tan earlier this year met with Tim Cook and has also spoken to CC. Way, his counterpart at TSM, about a partnership or joint venture, according to people familiar with the matter. And so, basically, there's a question about how much can Apple even get out of Intel? Apple, of course, moved off of Intel chips and is now going direct to TSM with the Apple Silicon Project. And Apple doesn't pay a lot to Intel if anything.

I think they sell, like, one Intel Mac still. It's like 10 years old refurbished. It's like a very slow computer. But of course, there are still things that Apple needs Intel chips for in the server and in to run their data centers. Like every company is kind of a customer of every other company. So there's probably something to be done there. But the question of like, how would an Apple Intel deal actually work is way less clear than an Nvidia Intel deal? Because Nvidia sells the Hopper chip, but then they sell Grace, which is the CPU.

They call it Grace Hopper. And you got Donald Trump. who led the Series A. He did. So now Intel is trying to raise the B and the Series A lead is going to look at, you know, potential B leads and say, hey, come on. It's kind of like that.

I think the better analogy is more like the Series B lead is going to the Series A lead and saying, because Apple and Intel grew up together. Apple had, like Apple exists because Intel exists. Apple would not have been able to build that MacBook Air that we saw from. 2007 without Intel. There was an Intel chip in the Mac for a long time. And so Apple's been a beneficiary. You used to be front and center in the marketing. Exactly. Intel inside.

You're buying this new computer. Yes. Yes. And so Apple has gotten so much out of Intel. They're so rich. They have deep pockets. They have tons of cash. And so the Series B lead is saying, hey, I'm going to do a bridge round here, but the Series A lead's got to come in if they want to maintain their position or they're getting crammed down. Cramed down in this position, in this scenario is getting crammed down in tariffs or getting crammed down in taxes or some other thing. It's all part of this art of the deal craziness. But it does seem like if you're Apple, you say, hey, there's a way to extend an olive branch to the administration with their technology agenda. They want to bring back semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. We're just

going to see this as an investment. We could put our money in treasury bills. We could put put our money in Intel stock. Let's put some money in Intel stock. It makes everyone happy. And so that might wind up being the nature of this deal. But then at the same time, it's totally possible that Apple wants to do some sort of new chip design. They want to go to Intel and they want to fab it with Intel and they find a way to do that. There is a world where Intel becomes a manufacturer for Apple Silicon chips because they are trying to get their most cutting edge node off the ground. They don't have customers. This is the famous thing that Liputon said on that quarterly earnings call that panicked everyone.

He was like, the big thing that we've been planning, no one wants it. And so that raised alarm bells, and that's where all this kind of came from. And Apple could potentially go to them and say, hey, yeah, the next iPhone chip or the next Mac chip will work with TSM. We're happy with TSM, but we'll also work with you, Intel, on your new fab that gets up and running. If you can deliver at these levels, and how are they going to deliver on that level? They need a lot of cash, so we're also putting up the cash. Yeah. And so another sort of circular deal, but, you know, the administration is kind of like greasing the wheels of all these deals to hopefully get Intel back on its feet and restore American semiconductor manufacturing.

In the meantime, Leopold's printing. In the meantime, Leopold is printing. So, congratulations to him. What else is going on? You shared a story about a Radio Shack Ponzi. Well, this was Ty Lopez. Oh, yes, I'm familiar with this. He did something.

He managed to raise like hundreds of millions of dollars for the new Radio Shack brand. Yes. He turned into crypto. He was buying all sorts of interesting things. Reb's primary business. So Ty Lopez is famous for the Here in My Garage guru video that was kind of sort of a book club, I think, at the bottom of the funnel. sort of a how to get rich, educational, inspirational hustle type genre of social media influencer. Huge buyer of YouTube ads in the early days.

Everyone saw that here in my garage video. But he went on a spree. Rev's primary business was purchasing distressed retail companies with name brand recognition and converting them to e-commerce only businesses. The securities offering that at issue involved eight Rev portfolio companies, Brahms, Dress Barn, Dress Barn, Franklin Mint, linens and things, which I have heard of, Models, Pier 1, which I've heard of, and Radio Shack, which I've also heard of, and I've never heard of Steinmark. Franklin Mint, Radio Shack.

This is, of course, from Matt Levine, one of the greatest writers on the internet these days. Not Bedbath and Beyond, not GameStop. Bedbath and Beyond sure was distressed. It filed for horrific bankruptcy in 2023, but before it raised a ton of money from retail investors and absolutely doomed at the market offerings. As its bankruptcy lawyers later, put it, it raised that money as part of the meme stock movement started and fueled on Reddit boards and social media website because, quote, it checked the two boxes needed to become a mean stock, a troubled financial situation and nostalgia value. And because it checked those boxes, bed bath was able to go out to ordinary investors and get them to shovel money into a furnace.

GameStop was also a part of that movement. Where is GameStop trading these days? GameStop was that movement because it was troubled and nostalgia. If you're nostalgic and troubled, we got a stock for you. GameStop, up 18% in the last month. No way. But down 13% year-to-date. What's the market cap? Current market cap's 11 billion.

That's huge. I feel like that's a lot. I mean, percentage of troubled, I mean, Bedbath and Beyond's bankrupt, so it's zero. Yeah. On a relative basis, that's the meme stock that, you know, had some value for the medium amount of time, we'll see. But it did so well out of being a meme stock that it's no longer, no longer particularly distressed. GameStop, as you saw, is going. But it's definitely pivoting to e-commerce. My point here is that if you go to retail investors and say, hey, let's teach those fat cats on Wall Street a lesson. We're going to revive Radio Shack. But with e-commerce, you're tapping into some deep and obvious patterns and you will undoubtedly raise a bunch of money that you can steal it. The quote of the top is from a securities exchange commission enforcement complaint against Tantanio, Adrian

Lopez, Alexander Mayer, and Maya Birken Road, Bloomberg News reports, a company that snatched up distressed brick-and-mortar brands, including Radio Shack Pier 1 imports and promised investors, big returns and a pivot to e-commerce operated like a Ponzi scheme. Yeah, so they actually raised debt, and they were offering a 25% preferred return. Yeah. And anyways, there were a lot of red flags. It's pretty crazy. They put out promotional videos that bragged that the portfolio companies were, quote, on fire, which the regulators did not like.

It says in the complaint that while some of the retailer brands generated revenue, none generated any profits. At least 5.9 million of the returns distributed to investors were in reality Ponzi-like payments funded by other investors. Now, so you framed it as debt, it sounds like they were equity investments. that were paying some sort of fake dividend. It wasn't actually structuring his debt. No, I think they were paying a fake dividend on the debt. Oh, really? It was like, oh, uh-oh.

Yeah, so there's a lot of going wrong here. So they accused the defendants of misappropriating approximately $16.1 million in investor funds, which were diverted to defendants Lopez and mayor's personal use. That's not good. The complaint also explains the business strategy, or at least the fundraising strategy. So Rev's primary business was identifying distressed companies with name brand, recognition, raising funds from investors in order to purchase the brand's assets and converting them as successful e-commerce-only businesses and one promotional video publicly available on the

internet. Tai Lopez, touted Rev's business approach as, quote, one of the best strategies you can invest in. That sounds like financial advice. I wouldn't do it myself. Seems right. So anyways, Matt Levine finishes it off, quote, a troubled financial situation and nostalgia value. Two best things you can have to raise money from individual investors in the 2020s. So I think enough people are getting burned on these now that I think people will learn their lesson. Yeah. Hopefully, but history repeats, or at least it rhymes.

Well, it's been a fantastic show. Great show. It is now, it's close to the weekend. It is. Whatever you're doing, have a great time. We will be back Monday. be back Monday or another episode we'll talk to you soon have a great evening have a great weekend Cheers.

Bye.